CHAPTER 12

Bernie found it hard to tell what hit people hardest when they heard the news about the imulsion platform.

The mood around New Jacinto felt like a communal bereavement. Even Mac trotted along beside her with his head lowered. She walked through the construction sites and new dirt roads that now stretched a few kilometers out into the farmland to the north, and tried to work out if this was the point at which the Old Jacinto population, the folks who’d stoically endured unending grub attacks and privation for fifteen years, would finally snap.

It wasn’t about the fuel. They didn’t give a shit about shortages of things they’d never had much of anyway. It was about hope being dashed again and again. There were only so many times you could take something away from people, hand it back, and then snatch it away again. It broke them. It made them shut down.

Whatever the Lambent were, they were worse than the grubs. And they were out there somewhere, in forms and shapes that people couldn’t even begin to guess at.

I really thought it was over. I really thought the worst monsters we had to face from now on were going to be human.

“Hey, dog-lady!” The shout made her turn. It was the Gorasni sailor called Yanik who seemed to have struck up a rapport with Baird. Friendship was too strong a word. “The shit gets deeper, yes?”

“I’m really sorry about your mates on the rig,” she said carefully. It wasn’t the time to mention fuel shortages. “Poor bastards.”

“So what use are we to you now? No fancy frigate, no imulsion, and your doctor thinks we are all murdering scum. The old Pelruan soldiers cross the road to avoid us. I think our wedding is over.”

“Honeymoon,” Bernie said automatically. “The phrase is the honeymoon’s over.”

The conversation had turned very awkward very fast. Mac must have sensed her shift of mood, because he stood growling at the back of his throat in his let-me-kill-him pose—ears forward, lip curled back, eyes fixed on the threat. Bernie held her hand against her leg and snapped her fingers to distract him.

“You think it is?” Yanik asked. He didn’t seem bothered by the growling at all, or maybe he had a lot of faith in her ability to control Mac. “Because Trescu is now in trouble, I think. And that is not good for anybody.”

Nothing was clear-cut for Bernie these days. One thing she’d accepted as an inarguable fact since childhood was that the Indies were the eternal enemy. The Pendulum Wars had become so embedded in every state’s culture that she’d been a Gear for a couple of years before she even started to ask herself why any South Islander—conquered and colonized nations, not willing volunteers—would see the COG as the natural good guys. But the UIR were a bunch of empire-building shits, too. Who could you trust? Well, she thought that she couldn’t trust the Stranded, either, but then Dizzy Wallin showed up and took that certainty away from her as well.

At least I know the dog isn’t cooking up a scheme. That’s something.

“I don’t know what Prescott thinks,” she said. “But we’re all in the same shit together. And we’re probably better off having you here than not having you, imulsion or no imulsion.”

Yanik clapped her on the shoulder and nodded at the two rifles—one Lancer, one Longshot—slung over her shoulder. Mac rumbled a warning again. “Good. I know I get no bullshit from you. You know how to deal with garayaz.”

He gave her a finger-to-brow salute and walked on through the construction site toward the naval base gates. Mac watched him for a few moments as if he was debating whether to go and sink his fangs in his face after all, just to teach him not to touch his pack leader.

“Come on, Mac,” Bernie said. “Just because we’ve got monsters, it doesn’t mean the Stranded have taken the day off. Seek!”

Bernie wondered if Yanik thought she was a reliable guide to COG attitudes because of Hoffman, that she knew more of what was going on than the rest of the Gears. They didn’t miss a damned thing, these people. But that was what came of living in a big village. Everybody knew your business sooner or later. A close community had its downside.

At least she had the time and the reason now to take Mac out tracking on foot. As Baird put it, “asshole hunting” was best done quietly and without a vehicle anyway. As soon as they reached the exclusion zone roadblock, Mac bounded ahead. The Gear on the checkpoint paused to chat to her.

“What the hell else is out there?” he said. “How long do you think we’ve got before that stalk thing gets here?”

“No idea,” she said, realizing that she felt increasingly pissed off at being out of the loop. “No bastard tells me anything.”

Mac led her through the woods for a couple of hours, and if there hadn’t been that growing list of crises jostling for attention at the back of her mind, she would have been as near to contented as she’d been for a long time. It was even quieter than usual. Most of the Ravens were grounded today—at least Baird kept her informed, even if nobody else bothered—and she couldn’t even hear the occasional grinding sounds of Packhorses in the distance.

Well, Pelruan’s okay. They learned to live without imulsion years ago.

And I suppose it means that the navy’s buggered. Can’t run a warship on vegetable oil.

Mac came cantering back to her with his follow-me face on, tail thrashing. She put her finger to her lips.

“Sssh. Good boy. Show me.”

And Mac did exactly that. He trotted off, head down, and led her through undergrowth to a tree-covered, barely visible path crushed by recent and repeated foot traffic. The battered vegetation and the various stages of wilting told her that the route had been used over the course of a few days.

Still worth staking out, then.

Bernie rubbed Mac’s head and gave him a snack of dried rabbit meat as a reward before finding a ledge further up a nearby bank to give her a better view of anyone moving along the path. Making a sniper hide was easy out here. She just eased herself into the bushes, made the ground comfortable with her jacket, and settled down prone with the Longshot propped on its bipod.

She could wait for days if she had to, but she didn’t expect it to take that long to get some trade. It was only a hundred meters to the path; a Longshot was overkill for that range. This wasn’t going to be the old Pendulum War days when she’d lay up for a week in a scrape to finally drop a target a thousand meters away. Mac flopped down beside her and rested his chin on his paws, occasionally looking up at her as if he was waiting for a sitrep.

It’s going to be hard to hand that dog back to Will. It really is.

Mac just happened to be the one dog out of all Will Berenz’s animals who took a shine to her. He accepted her as his new pack leader and he did whatever she asked, sometimes working out what she wanted even when she forgot his special commands. She found herself rehearsing how she would ask Berenz what she would have to barter to keep him.

It was a few hours before she got the first indication that someone was coming. Mac, head still on his paws, pricked up his ears. She put her hand on his back to keep him down. Eventually she heard what the dog must have reacted to; the slow swishing sound of someone picking their way carefully through grass and bushes. It took a few moments of scoping up and down the path before she saw her target flash across her optics. At that moment, another Bernie took over.

She’d developed her own concentration technique during sniper training. She imagined what her target would go on to do next if she didn’t take him—or her—out with one shot. It always worked.

When she settled on the movement, it turned out to be a man of about forty with a rifle across his back, carrying a box with rope handles. He kept shifting it—holding it in both arms one moment, pausing to switch to the handles the next—and that told her it was heavy, possibly ammo. He couldn’t move fast and had to wade through the vegetation.

Swish … swish … swish …

Okay … is he alone?

If she’d interrupted a supply column, she couldn’t shoot and run from this position, so if there were others coming she’d have to leave it and just trail them at a safe distance to locate their camp. This wasn’t a great place to start a firefight.

I ought to let him pass and track them anyway.

The man’s head was in her crosswires now. She had to make the call. This was a decision she’d made maybe hundreds of times in her service career, but it was still something of a gamble every time. And she very rarely thought about her target in human terms, but today—she did.

Okay. End it now. He’ll never know he’s dead. Not hours of bleeding out. Not running for his life. Just gone, just like that.

Bernie exhaled, held that breath, and squeezed the trigger. Crack. She saw the spray of blood as the man dropped instantly. Relief flooded her gut. Mac flinched at the sudden noise but stayed put.

“Good boy,” she whispered. “You’re the best spotter I ever had.”

She got to a kneeling position and waited a few moments to be sure there was nobody right behind the guy. Then Mac jumped up and stood staring down the slope to the left, hyperalert. He was a great spotter, all right; there was someone else out there. And they couldn’t have failed to hear that shot.

Shit. Bang out, engage, or lie low?

Bernie reloaded the Longshot just in case, then took up the Lancer. Two younger men were moving at a crouch along the path, pausing to check around them every few meters. One had a handgun and the other a hunting rifle. They moved right up to within a few meters of the other man’s body, and Bernie braced for the reaction when they finally fell over him. They’d freeze. They’d look. And that was the window she had to drop both of them.

Now they were almost in front of her. They still hadn’t spotted her. They still hadn’t found the body, either, but there was no way they could miss it if they carried on. She exhaled slowly.

Wait. Wait.

But something subconscious took the decision, not the sniper part of her brain at all. Them or me. Simple. Bernie opened up with the Lancer from the cover of the bushes and put five or six short bursts through the two men at chest level. Then she hunched down as flat on her knees as she could, waiting again, listening to crows squawking high in the canopy, wondering if a small army was now heading her way.

But nothing came. Eventually she got up, legs shaking, searched the bodies—definitely dead, no awkward coup de grâce needed—and took their weapons.

The box was full of ammo, but it was too heavy to carry with all the extra firearms. She dragged it into a well-hidden spot she could find again for recovery later. Every round that she could scavenge counted.

That’s drill for you. That’s years on the clock. I evaluate the risks, take what’s useful, cache the ammo. But I never used to think about the who and the why of dead men.

“Home, Mac.” She could hear her own voice shaking and made an effort to steady it before she pressed her earpiece. “Mataki to Control—enemy contact in grid. Charlie Seven, three hostiles, all dead. I’m on my way back in.”

Mathieson responded. “Roger that, Mataki. You just doing a little opportunistic hunting?”

“You could say that.”

“Byrne says she can swing by with the bike and RV with you.”

What am I, the charity case now? “I’ve got the dog with me.”

“Can he ride a bike?”

Mac looked up at her with sad brown eyes: Don’t do that to me, Ma. “It’s okay, Control, I’m making my way to the main road. I’ll be a couple of hours at least.”

“Leave your channel open in case we need to locate you. Everyone’s jumpy at the moment. Don’t want any friendly fire on my watch.”

Bernie didn’t think any Gear had reached that level of jumpy on Vectes. “Got it, Control. Tell everyone not to open fire on the harmless old bag lady and her mongrel. Mataki out.”

Bernie picked her way through the woods, putting her trust in Mac’s ears and nose. Yes, you really could trust a dog. Mac would go all out to defend his pack—her—and it probably never crossed his mind that a human might not put everything on the line for him. She decided to spoil him rotten when they got back to base. He could sleep on her bed and eat her dinner, and maybe Baird’s, too. The dog deserved it.

And I shot those guys.

The two extra rifles weighed heavily on her. She longed for a hot bath and a longer sleep. At least there was plenty of water and electricity thanks to the river, even if the COG was now reduced to running vehicles on cooking oil.

What was the point of capping them?

I mean, beyond orders, why? They’re a minor irritation compared to what’s waiting out there. Did I do it for Rory Andresen? For me? What?

Mac stopped and waited for her to catch up, tongue lolling. He seemed relaxed. As long as he stayed like that, she was sure she wasn’t about to run into any more Stranded. But she kept her Lancer powered up and a round chambered in her Longshot, just in case.

I don’t know how many people I’ve killed in my time. I actually can’t count them. And that’s never bothered me until now.

Bernie gave up trying to work out why—not guilt, not pity, nothing obvious like that—and wondered if it was just some primal realization that she was helping the world run out of humans, even if they were the worst specimens of the species.

“Hey, look—road,” she said. They’d come out of the woodland on a slope above the main route to Pelruan. Mac stared up into her face, all unquestioning devotion. “You’re a great guide dog, too. Who’s a clever boy? Yeah, you are. Come on. Dinner.”

She could hear a Raven in the distance as she kept to the cover of the hedgerows. Her reaction was to look up from time to time just to see where the helicopter was heading, but as this one got closer, she could see it was covering a narrow search pattern. Her radio clicked.

“Hey, Mataki, where are you?” It was Gill Gettner. “I’ve got a rough fix on you from the transmitters, but for fuck’s sake come out in the open so I can see you.”

There’s a surprise. “Roger that, Major.”

Bernie wasn’t expecting to be extracted. She broke cover cautiously and dropped to one knee while she waited, just in case some arsehole was out there waiting just as patiently as she had to claw back a little revenge. The Raven landed close enough to sandblast her face. Mel Barber beckoned from the crew bay.

“Is this a lift home?” Bernie ducked her head and ran to the chopper. Mac slunk behind, not used to those rotors and smells and terrible noises. “What a kind and well-brought-up young man you are.”

“Shit, Bernie, look at all that firepower on your back. Someone piss you off?”

Bernie picked up a hesitant Mac and shoved him bodily onto the Raven. “Yeah, my estrogen flatlined. Come on, help me stow this stuff. I had to cache the ammo.”

“Did you get their gold fillings as well?”

“Bugger. Knew I forgot something.” She fastened her restraints, clipped Mac’s collar to a safety line, and sat him between her knees. “So what brings you out this way at a time of fuel crises?” A thought crossed her mind, and she wasn’t amused. “Hoffman?”

“No. Fenix requested we haul your ass back to base after we dropped off supplies for Anya.” Barber always was an open and honest soul. “He says to save your ammo for the glowies.”

“Shinies,” Gettner said. The Raven lifted and banked steeply, making Mac scrabble for a grip on the deck. “I prefer shinies. And don’t let that dog pee in my bird.”

Gettner and Barber were usually a double act of vitriolic commentary, but they were definitely forcing the banter today. Bernie wondered how bad it had been out on that rig.

“Too late,” Bernie said.

“The piss?”

“Too late to save the ammo.”

It was probably too late for a whole lot of things now, but all Bernie could focus on was the next twenty-six hours. Anything after that was a renewable daily bonus.

Hoffman had already seen how Prescott conducted himself at the end of the world—twice.

The man had held his nerve through the Hammer of Dawn strike, and he hadn’t batted an eyelid when Jacinto was sunk. Hoffman wondered what it was going to take to make the sweat bead on that aristocratic top lip.

He couldn’t decide if Prescott didn’t know enough to be scared, if he knew something nobody else did, or if he was just missing a pair of adrenal glands. Whatever it was, he sat at the long meeting table in the sail loft as if it was another emergency management meeting of the kind they used to hold weekly in Jacinto to measure just how deep the shit was getting.

Trescu, not one of life’s nervous types, looked a lot closer to the edge than Prescott ever had. Despite himself, Hoffman found something to admire in the guy’s willingness to roll up his sleeves and do the tough jobs. One moment, he’d blown a prisoner’s brains out; the next, he’d turned around and calmly faced an all-too-possible death to save the team on that rig. The only thing that seemed to scare him was losing his people. Gorasnaya, a proud nation for a thousand years, was now a dwindling village. Hoffman realized that was worse than galling for the Gorasni; it was a collective death, an extinction, a reflection of what now faced all of humanity.

I know how it feels, Trescu. You wake up sweating because you might screw up and the human race goes extinct on your watch. Now place your bets on the odds of Prescott putting his ass on the line for us.

“Losing the supply is a major blow,” Prescott said. “I admit that. But it’s something we can deal with in time. What will it take to restore the wells?”

Trescu’s face was covered in small marks as if he’d taken a shrapnel blast. He nursed a badly burned hand under the table and probably thought Hoffman hadn’t noticed.

“Would that be before we stop the Lambent, or after?” he asked quietly.

“For argument’s sake.”

“I have no idea how damaged the wellheads are. We would need divers with special equipment for that, or a remotely controlled deep-sea bot. And once we evaluated the damage, we would need to use the most advanced engineering techniques to rebuild the entire platform.” Trescu leaned forward and folded his arms on the desk, slipping his injured hand out of sight. His voice suddenly hardened. “And in case it has escaped your attention, Chairman, none of those things exist on Sera any longer. So my technical assessment is that we are completely and utterly fucked.”

Hoffman reached a decision at that moment. It was something he never believed he was even capable of thinking.

I can’t just be a good loyal soldier and obey the Chairman. I can’t do this any longer. We have to have a plan for when the wheels come off this damn thing completely.

And they would. As the remnants of the world lurched from crisis to crisis, it always felt like this had to be the rock bottom. But it never was. There was always some new depth to plumb.

Trescu knew it, too.

He turned his head very casually and met Hoffman’s eyes for less than a blink, and leaned back in his seat again.

“Well, I understand that,” Prescott said. “Your tanker crew did well to get that last consignment off the rig. That buys us some breathing space. The question now is how much of our resources we devote to reconnaissance off the island. We could wait and see what comes our way. We could also expend a lot of irreplaceable fuel gathering intelligence. But my biggest concern is that we have no idea how many forms these Lambent have evolved into, or how to kill them effectively.”

The bastard was always good at restating the obvious. Hoffman decided to embroider reality a little. It was better than asking permission from a man who really didn’t seem to be on the same page as everyone else.

But he’s not stupid. What’s he up to?

“I’ve got Ravens out doing an aerial recon on the course the stalks were taking,” Hoffman lied. Well, he’d have them airborne again inside the hour. “Whatever we learn from that tells us how long we might have. But we’ve got to assume that they’ll reach us sooner or later. We have to be ready.”

“Give me a plan.”

“I don’t know what we can do to stop the stalks, but we know we can kill polyps,” Hoffman said. “I’m thinking in the same terms as I would for human infantry—obstacles to slow them down and concentrate them in a kill zone while we pick them off. The problem remains—how many of them can a stalk disgorge? And is this aquatic, or is it a land-based organism? We need to work out what kills most for least effort.”

Trescu sat in silence, just staring at the charts on the wall for a while.

“Commander?” Prescott said.

“Stranded,” Trescu said.

“What about them?”

“Make them do something useful. They have enclaves on the mainland. We know these vermin stay in touch with one another, so who better to tell us about any stalk incursions there?”

“And they’re going to cooperate fully after the recent unpleasantness with your people, are they?”

Trescu raised an eyebrow. “Even garayazi recognize that what kills us will also kill them. And to defend this island, we will need them to work with us, not against us.”

Trescu rarely suggested anything that he hadn’t already thought through to its logical conclusion. Hoffman had seen enough to know that. But he’d given up wondering if the guy had an agenda beyond keeping his people alive, because even that was starting to look massively ambitious now.

“Just spit it out,” Hoffman said. “Are you saying we should recruit them for however long it takes, or just ask them nicely not to bother us while we’re fighting something worse than them?”

“I don’t know.” Trescu shrugged. “I think I mean that we should talk to whoever runs the biggest gang now and explain what’s going to overrun us and them if we fail to pool our resources.”

Prescott did his unimpressed gesture, that slight backward tilt of the head so he could look down his nose at someone without needing to stand up to do it. Hoffman struggled daily to find something human to like in the man.

“They’d use this as an opportunity to undermine us,” Prescott said. “They see themselves as the alternative future for Sera. If we go cap in hand to them and say we need help to deal with the Lambent, they won’t be able to focus on the size of the threat. Only what leverage they can gain from it.”

Takes one to know one. Hoffman had reached the stage where Prescott’s objection to anything became a powerful incentive to do it. He made a mental note to be careful of that, because that asshole could spot any pressable button in others. He’d use it.

“If it only succeeds in making them crap their pants and leave the island, that’d be a plus,” Hoffman said.

Prescott didn’t forbid him to make contact with the gangs. In fact, he didn’t say anything. Hoffman hated it when he couldn’t get a definite answer out of him. He waited for one anyway, but it was Trescu who broke the silence.

“Either way, Chairman, we have to fortify the island.” Trescu pushed his chair back with a definite gesture of this-meeting-is-over. “I would like to discuss operational detail with Colonel Hoffman later. Now I have to explain myself to Gorasnaya. Many of my people thought I was insane to bring us here and surrender our fleet and our fuel. I must persuade them that schisms and power struggles now will be the end of us.”

Prescott understood that, if nothing else. Hoffman could see the change in the set of his jaw. It would have been fascinating to carry on watching these two maneuver and double-bluff each other, if only there hadn’t been an unknown quantity of goddamn Lambent waiting out there to kill every last human on Sera.

“I’ll walk with you, Commander,” Hoffman said. “Just don’t expect me to take a bullet for you.”

Trescu held the door open for him. “Colonel, I would never presume such a thing.”

Outside, Royston Sharle, the emergency management chief, was waiting to see Prescott with Aleksander Reid. Hoffman exchanged nods with them as he passed. Reid shuffled his papers and managed a smile at his superior.

“Three more Stranded,” Reid said. “I have to say that Mataki’s a game old bird. You Royal Tyrans really are hard as nails.”

“What?”

“She slotted three Stranded transporting ammo. Gettner’s just brought her back.”

Damn. Bernie certainly picked her moments. It was the worst possible time to piss off the gangs. As soon as the dismay crossed Hoffman’s mind, he despised himself—how could he even think that? Andresen and the others not even cold in their graves, and here he was, worrying about offending these motherfuckers? He was inhaling too much around politicians. Screw that.

“Gettner can head back out and get me some aerial recon,” Hoffman said. “And I want your projections of fuel use on my desk by twenty-three hundred.”

“Very good, sir.” Reid nodded. That was the smart response. “Of course.”

Hoffman and Trescu headed down the stairs in total silence and were halfway across the parade ground before either of them said anything. Hoffman was still working out how to broach the subject of making sure things got done the army way.

Trescu slowed down to a leisurely pace.

“So … you don’t like Major Reid. You don’t like Prescott. You don’t like me. I don’t like Prescott, and I certainly don’t like you. But I trust you, Hoffman, and I do not trust him. Better a bastard I can trust than sociable company who would put a knife between my ribs.”

“I’ll remember to get that put on my gravestone.” Shit, I’ve got more common ground with an Indie psychopath than my own head of state. Fine. That’s what it’s going to take. “I’m up for telling the gangs what’s coming and striking a deal until we get rid of the Lambent.”

“It took fifteen years to deal with the Locust, so this might be a very long-term plan,” Trescu said. “But let us live in hope that we can get on with killing each other again soon.”

“There’s regular anti-Stranded sentiment, and then there’s the extra-strength version. What’s your problem, Commander?”

“If we ever return to the mainland,” Trescu said, “I shall personally show you the mass graves at a Gorasnayan town called Meschov. Or Chalitz. Or a dozen other places where we buried our women and children.”

It was one of those answers that cut any further questions off at the knees. But at least it was an indication that Stranded could organize themselves well enough to fight a tough enemy. It was just their bad luck that they’d picked on the Gorasni.

“Okay,” Hoffman said, making a mental note to look up Meschov as soon as he got a chance. “When the recon information comes back, we put a plan together. In the meantime, we make contact with the gang chiefs, and then Prescott can disown us if the civvies object to the plan.”

“Mine won’t. There are murmurs, but they’ll follow me in the end. And remember we still have two Stranded prisoners.”

“That’s not going to bring the gangs to the table. Not now.”

“I wasn’t thinking of hostage tactics. Not this time.”

Trescu nodded politely and walked off in the direction of the camp that was still effectively a separate state, whatever Prescott thought. Hoffman went to CIC and sat gazing at the sector chart on the wall, trying to imagine how the hell he could fortify an island against something that could punch its way through ships’ hulls and seabeds.

He moved over to sit at the comms desk and picked up the mike. He really needed to know how far this stalk had traveled.

“Hoffman to KR-Eight-Zero. Where are you, Gettner?”

The response was instant. “Threatening a technician in the machine shop, sir. I need a fuel-line part, and I need it now.”

“Well, when you’ve beaten it out of him, take a bot and get back on recon. Find that stalk and send me back some images.”

“A bot would be Jack, then. He’s the only one still running.” Gettner broke off for a moment to savage the technician. “Colonel, we’ve still got the extended range fuel tanks. Want us to take a look at some other dry land and see if this thing has come ashore anywhere else?”

Nobody had been back to the Tyran coast since the evacuation of Jacinto, or even overflown other islands. It hadn’t been worth the fuel when all resources were needed to build a new home on Vectes.

But Hoffman needed to know if the stalks could spread ashore, and how. So far, they’d only emerged at sea. It would also provide a handy lie-detector test when he came to talk to the Stranded gangs.

“Do it, Major,” he said. “And no dumbass risks. Take Delta with you.”

“Do they know?” Baird asked. “The pirate demographic, I mean. Do they understand what skewered their boat?”

Marcus leaned on the starboard door gun as the Raven combed the featureless carpet of choppy white waves beneath the Raven. “Depends how much they get to hear from their buddies inside the wire. Because they weren’t taking any advice from me.”

Baird thought that was one more reason why Prescott should never have given the assholes an amnesty. Even if they’d been searched for weapons and radios going in, it was impossible to maintain that level of security. Gears on watch got tired and bored. Components got smuggled in one at a time. People sneaked out. It just wasn’t possible to lock down New Jacinto.

When we were surrounded by grubs back home, nobody wanted to sneak out.

“So even if they know it’s not us sinking their boats, what difference does it make?” Dom asked. “It’s not like they’re an armored division whose ass we need to kiss to help us out.”

Cole was scribbling on a scrap of paper spread on his knee, occasionally pausing to tap the end of a stubby pencil against his chest plate while he pondered something. He was still writing letters home to a dead mom. Baird wondered what it felt like to have that kind of bond with your folks. It had to hurt. He was glad he’d got all that dependency shit out his system when he was a kid.

“Beats having them in our hair when we’re busy with glowies,” Cole said.

“Shinies,” Gettner said. “Hey, come on, Delta. Concentrate on the search. Mel, are these bearings right?”

“’Fraid so.” Barber was on the other door gun. “That’s where it was.”

There wasn’t a trace of the imulsion rig visible, not even much of an imulsion slick. Baird felt a glimmer of hope that the wells had somehow been capped, although he was sure the Gorasni guys had said they’d only stopped pumping, because that gave him hope. In time, he could rig a bot to dive and investigate. Much later, he might even be able to work out how to rebuild the rig.

Come on, who the hell am I kidding? Where am I going to find that kind of heavy engineering now? It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.

The realization depressed him more than he expected. He tried to work out if it was any intelligent man’s reaction to the loss of the COG’s only source of imulsion, or some sort of sentimental attachment to a clever piece of engineering, or just … shit, he didn’t know what it was, or why it had hit him now so many years after civilization had gone down the lavatory. He pulled his goggles over his eyes and busied himself staring at a zillion square kilometers of nothing.

Dom nudged him. “You okay, Baird?”

Shit. So I tell a guy who had to put his wife down like a dog that I’m upset about a piece of metal. Yeah, that’s going to help squad relations a lot.

“Just wondering where the next barrel of imulsion’s coming from,” Baird said, feeling the strain of unfamiliar tact.

“The mainland.”

“Well, first there’s getting there, then there’s dodging glowies, and then here’s the Stranded that’ll probably be all over the first rig we find, and then there’s extracting it and shipping it back. But yeah, apart from that, it’ll be a breeze.”

Dom opened his mouth slightly as if he was shaping up to say something, then folded his arms and carried on looking out the door.

Cole folded his letter carefully and slid it into his belt. “Damon, baby, you want a colorin’ book? I know you get antsy on long rides.”

“Hey, you kids in the back,” Gettner said. “Any of you bothering to check the chart as we go? I can’t do every damn thing.”

“You lost, Major?” Baird asked.

“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “I’m continuing on the bearing the stalks took—”

“Yeah, I’m sure they always travel in a straight line …”

“—and I don’t think there should be any landmass up ahead. Not that those two clauses are related in any way.”

Gettner was looking dead ahead. Everyone in the crew bay was looking at roughly a 120-degree arc on either side. Marcus hung on to the grab rail and leaned out of the gun door to get a better view.

“Looks like an island to me,” he said. “Because the chances of it being a bulk container are about zero.”

“Glad I’m not hallucinating. Because that’s definitely not on the charts, and I’m not off course. We’ve still got enough Hammer satellites working to get an accurate fix.”

Dom folded the chart into a manageable size to study it. Baird, impatient, leaned over him.

“Let me take a look.” There was always a simple answer to this kind of thing. “See? This is the edge of a tectonic plate. That’s how new volcanic islands get formed—the plates move and magma squirts up to the surface. All these island chains, right down to the South Islands, were formed the same way. Happens all the time.”

“How come I haven’t seen one before?” Gettner said.

“Okay, maybe not every day. But it’s not a mystery. Eruptions happen.”

“How long do those things emit smoke once they break the surface?” Marcus asked, checking out the horizon with his binoculars.

“No idea. Can you see smoke, then?”

“No.”

“I’m going to take a look anyway,” Gettner said. “Crazy not to.”

There was still no sign of stalks or polyps. Baird gave the chart back to Dom and got up to lean out of the bay door, trying to work out how the things decided where to go if they weren’t attracted by imulsion pollution. If they were, then they should have been partying on the site of the sunken platform. The idea that these glorified vegetables might be following some kind of plan creeped him out more than the grubs ever had.

“So what makes glowies glow?” he said. “We definitely saw glowy Locust in the tunnels. And all that luminous snot moving around. But the stalks and the polyps don’t look like anything I’ve seen before.”

“Least we know why the Locust Queen was getting her panties in a bunch about ’em,” Cole said.

“I hate it when I think of all the things I could have asked her.”

Cole tapped his pencil on his armor again and went back to the paper. “It’s not like she was holding a news conference or anything. We were trying to avoid losing vital organs at the time.”

“You think we could have done a deal with them? You know—ganged up with them on the glowies, and lived happily ever after?”

Dom looked up, and Baird knew he’d somehow said the wrong thing.

“You think you could stop talking shit for five minutes?” Dom asked him quietly. “Just for once?”

Baird couldn’t see Marcus from this side of the Raven, but he could hear him. It was just a gravelly sigh. Baird took the hint.

“Yeah, definitely an island,” Gettner said. “Nat, prep Jack for me. Postcard time in about ten minutes. Get me some good recon images.”

“Can we name it?” Cole asked.

There was a sudden silence. Cole wasn’t joking. Baird felt the atmosphere shift ever so slightly in the Raven, from that mock-aggressive familiarity of guys who’d spent way too long cooped up together, to a kind of … awkwardness. He was going to fill the silence with something smart-ass, as he always did out of habit, but then he realized what had shut them up. What did you call a new island, a new species—a new anything?

You named it after someone.

And everyone had lost someone they probably wanted to commemorate—except him, of course, and he was glad to be spared all that shit. Dom’s wife, Marcus’s dad, Cole’s entire family but probably his mom—yeah, the whole squad was thinking it would have been nice to permanently honor the dead. Gettner and Barber probably had the same thought, too, although Baird didn’t know who each of them pined for.

“Let’s see if it’s a pile of shit and trouble first,” Baird said, trying to be helpful. “Might not want to name it at all.”

See, I can do tact. I can do diplomacy.

“Can’t see any forest,” Barber said. “Jagged outline. A lot of haze.”

“Rock.” Marcus moved off the gun and stood in the crew bay watching the island through binoculars. “Baird’s right. Gray rock.”

“Hey, look at the gray crap on the water, too. Pumice. Yeah, recent volcanic eruption.”

Marcus made another noise in his throat, not his multipurpose grunt but an involuntary reaction as if he’d been caught out by something.

“Ahh shit,” he said at last. “You see that, Barber?”

Barber adjusted the lens on the camera. “Fuck. Yes.”

“Come on, share,” Baird said.

They didn’t have to. In less than a minute, the Raven was close enough to the uncharted island for Baird to see exactly what Marcus meant.

It was a lifeless mass of charcoal-gray rock about eight or nine kilometers wide, its surface rough and jagged. At first Baird thought two twisted shapes that rose above the general mound were just lava outflows that had cooled in freak formations, maybe because pumice had already been washed away from around them. But then the picture fell into place, and he knew he’d seen those organic-looking gnarled shafts before.

“Frigging stalks,” he said. “Wow, they don’t hang about.”

“Another reason to avoid sitting directly over the island,” Gettner said. “Although if those things are on the march, we know they can reach up from the sea anyway.”

“Of course,” Baird said, knowing this wasn’t going to cheer up anybody, “maybe they’re showing up everywhere.”

“Any polyps?”

“Can’t see anything. Just stalks.”

Barber released Jack from its housing. The egg-shaped bot hovered at the open door, mechanical arms unfolded. This was definitely a recon job for a remote.

“Can I add to the general misery?” Barber asked. “Does it look to anyone else like those stalks have come up through the lava, not over it?”

“Yeah,” Marcus said. “It does.” He turned to the bot. “Go on, Jack. Take a look. Be careful.”

The bot moved out of the Raven’s bay and headed for the island. Gettner could see the images that Jack was relaying to her monitor, but everyone else had to sweat it out.

“Just stalks,” she said. “Not doing anything, either. No movement, no polyps, nothing. Oh, wait—no, that’s a seabird.” She took the Raven high above the island, banking slightly. “No obvious vent or smoke, but hey, these outflows can just erupt right under you without warning and it’s endex.”

“I’d be more worried about the killer coral from hell,” Baird said. “If you get a spike of that straight through the fuselage, we won’t be going home anytime soon.”

“I’m just seeing dormant stalks,” Gettner said. “Hey, Marcus, Nat, want to check? Look. They’re just sitting there.”

“Yeah, but does that mean they’re dormant?” Baird asked.

“They’re not spewing shinies, and that’s dormant enough for me, Corporal. What am I, emeritus professor of fucking botany or something?”

Baird flinched inside. What was it with all these damn women Gears? They were spitting venom the whole time. Even Bernie could strip paint with her stream of abuse when you somehow got on the wrong side of her. The only woman who didn’t rip you a new one for no damn reason was Anya.

“Just saying,” Baird said, determined at least to have the last word and not slink away. “We don’t know what their life cycle is. We don’t even know if they always go around holding hands with the polyps. Maybe the polyps just use the stalks for transport when they get a chance.”

“Does it matter?” Dom asked. “They’re all Lambent.”

“It matters if we want to find the best way to kill them.”

“I’m going to update Control,” Barber said. “Wait one.”

Gettner took the Raven down a little lower to fly along the coastline, and for a moment—a dumbass moment—Baird almost asked her to winch him down to the surface. Nobody had ever set foot on that ground before. It was as new as land ever got. Then he thought better of it. On the north side, steam or white smoke was still venting from a hole on the shoreline. There were no more stalks. Maybe they’d found the place too dauntingly barren as well.

“Keep an eye on the fuel,” Gettner said. “One more trip around the harbor, then we move on.”

Barber cut in. “Hey, Gill, listen around channel fifty. It’s breaking up, but I think we’ve picked up interference from the Stranded long-range net.”

Marcus perked up. “Can we get a fix on their transmitter? Been quiet for a long time.”

“Let’s swing by and pick up Jack. Then we can try getting a bearing.”

“It beats going back empty-handed,” Gettner said. “Fuel permitting, I think we should check out the mainland on the next sortie. Concentrate on where this stuff is making landfall, or else we’ll be chasing our own asses all over the ocean.”

Baird settled down at the comms position in the tail of the Raven and eavesdropped while Barber searched for a clearer signal. Occasionally, he heard broken bursts of crackling conversation that sounded like the skippers of boats confirming their positions.

“So they’re keeping mobile,” Marcus said. “How we doing, Barber?”

Gettner turned the Raven a couple more times until Barber seemed satisfied he had a location.

“It’s only a hundred kilometers or so off our course,” he said. “Got to be worth the fuel. Twenty-, thirty-minute deviation, tops.”

Baird had never thought of the Stranded gangs as much more than scavengers with a few fast patrol boats and—somehow—access to fuel, preying on the regular Stranded living in isolated outposts across the islands and coast of the mainland. They were parasites on the backs of other parasites. How many Stranded were out there?

Maybe there’s more of them than there are of us. But they’re scattered. You can’t live that way. You’ve got to have numbers. You’ve got to organize.

“Imagine living at sea most of the time,” Dom said, like he was talking to himself. He almost sounded wistful.

Cole still looked a bit green around the gills. “Baby, that’s my worst nightmare. Or living in a Raven. The Cole Train’s strictly land-based.”

Baird lost interest in the sea beneath and went back to checking out the maps, trying to imagine where he’d go if he was a stalk and what might lead him there. He was still churning over the imulsion trail theory and wondering if it was just coincidence—it could have easily been discharged effluent that the things were following—when Marcus and Dom both drew in a long breath at the same time. Baird looked up, expecting more evidence of stalks.

Barber sighed. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”

They’d found the Stranded transmitter, all right. The only question was which vessel out of the fleet below it was located in.

The vessels below weren’t warships, but that didn’t matter. They were a mix of freighters, leisure craft, powerboats, small tankers, tugs, and even a car ferry. They were keeping station just like a proper fleet, and there were a hell of a lot of them.

“It’s like the En-COG fleet review,” Gettner said. “In the days when we had a real navy.”

Baird started counting. There were at least a hundred.

“So guess what course they’re on,” Gettner said. “Go on. Guess.”