CHAPTER 14

“Okay, I’ll field this call if you’re all out of the office,” Gettner said. “But they didn’t mistake us for a SAR bird.”

Dom listened on the radio. The incoming voice was one he thought he’d heard before, and Marcus’s slow blink confirmed it. This was the guy he’d called from Steady Eddie.

“I’ll talk to him,” Marcus said. He took a breath and pressed his earpiece. “This is Sergeant Fenix. Remember me?”

“Hey, COG. Dropped by to strafe us? Or do we need to watch for submarines this time? You’re so versatile.”

“You need to watch for the things that sunk your cruiser. Who am I talking to?”

“Lyle Ollivar. Remember that guy you torpedoed after agreeing to a truce with us? I took over from him. They wanted someone less trusting in the position.”

“Okay, pissing contest over. You know what Lambent are?”

“We hear the name.”

“We lose ships to them. So do you. They’re the things that make the Locust crap their pants. You want to know how bad things could get?”

“Oh, we know.”

Dom looked at Baird for a moment. Did they know about the imulsion rig yet? If they did, did they understand what had actually happened? There was only so much they could glean from whatever got whispered and passed around between Stranded on the island, and they probably hadn’t cracked COG radio encryption yet. Baird just shrugged.

“We need to talk,” Marcus said. He gestured to Dom to get his attention and mouthed call Hoffman. “No bullshit. I’m willing to come to you.”

Ollivar paused. “Unarmed.”

“If you don’t count a cannoned-up Raven for insurance, yes.”

Dom gave Marcus an emphatic shake of the head just as Control responded. You must be crazy. Don’t do it. He moved to the back of the crew bay to get out of audio range. “Control, this is Santiago. I need to speak to Hoffman.”

Marcus carried on the negotiation. Dom thought it was a waste of time, but Marcus did things by the book—at first, anyway. He always gave assholes one chance. Maybe it was the right thing to do. For every bastard who killed Dom’s buddies, there were many more Stranded who were just pitiful losers, or unlucky like Dizzy, or decent folk like whoever had looked after Maria for years before the grubs got her.

I’ll never know who they were. They might even be on those boats down there.

Yeah. My wife was Stranded, too.

Dom couldn’t forget that. Today was one of the rough patches he plunged back into—less frequently now, but near-unbearable all the same. It was coming up to the anniversary of the day he’d first met Maria. There were more good days than bad now, but the bad ones still came back with a vengeance, grabbed him, and whispered: You lost them, all—kids, parents, wife, brother, friends. There’s only Marcus left.

Marcus was still waiting for a response from Ollivar, staring out of the Raven’s door. Hoffman came on the radio.

“What is it, Dom?”

“Sir, we’ve located a Stranded fleet west of the island, inbound. Marcus is talking to their leader.”

“They planning an assault?”

“If they are, Captain Michaelson can probably reduce it to driftwood. Maybe landing arms, maybe something else entirely.”

“Do you need backup?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell Marcus—no deals we can’t honor.”

“Got it, sir. Stand by. Santiago out.”

Gettner cut in. “I can’t circle here all day.”

“Give him a few minutes,” Marcus said. “If he’s up for it, can you land me?”

“You’re nuts.”

“Can you?”

“You can rope down to the car ferry on the edge of the convoy. I can approach that from its starboard side—less chance of being shot at.”

“If you’re roping down, so am I,” Dom said.

Marcus ignored him. “If it goes to rat shit, Major, bang out and get back to base.”

Screw that. Dom started laying out two rappel lines on the deck in front of his seat. He’s not going down there alone. Or unarmed. They never notice the knife. They’re too fixed on the fucking chainsaw to care about the knife.

“Okay, Sergeant, how and where are we going to do this?”

“Car ferry. Space to fast-rope down.”

“No need to tell you what happens if you live up to my expectations of you fascists and do anything dumb.”

Gettner looped the Raven around and came in lower than Dom thought she’d risk.

“Don’t hang about,” she said. “I don’t fancy ditching here when I run out of fuel.”

Barber checked Marcus’s rappel line and stood ready to give him an assist off the edge of the bay. Marcus’s attention was on what was underneath him, not behind, so Dom just exchanged nods with Barber and stepped into position to follow down. It was almost funny that there was no discussion needed. Marcus was doing something sacrificially risky, so Dom was going to ride shotgun, and Barber was going to enable that—again. Marcus could argue the toss about it later with Dom, after he didn’t get shot or taken hostage.

I’m still a commando. I can do this shit.

Their boots hit the ferry’s deck. Marcus crouched as the Raven lifted clear, looking faintly annoyed.

“You ever stop to think that Ollivar might object to two Gears when he thought he was dealing with one?”

“He can kiss my ass,” Dom said. He noted the welcoming committee of four armed Stranded around the landing area. “What are you going to say to him?”

“That he’s in the same shit as we are. See where we go from there.”

It took Ollivar ten fuel-wasting minutes to arrive. His powerboat—gun on the foredeck, very snazzy, a real drug baron’s gin palace—brought him alongside, and he boarded with the ease of an admiral on a ship inspection visit.

He didn’t look like a pirate, unless Dom counted the assault rifle. He was thirtyish and well groomed, like an ambitious middle manager on his day off doing a bit of adventure training. This was the chief of the quaintly named Lesser Islands Free Trade Association.

The fact that kill-crazy Trescu was responsible for the death of his predecessor probably didn’t matter much to a man who saw the COG and Gorasnaya as being one and the same.

Well, we say they are, too. What’s the guy to think?

“I really hate it when history repeats itself,” Ollivar said, apparently unworried by Dom’s unexpected arrival. “So why should I give you lying fucks the time of day?”

Marcus shrugged. “We’re having problems with the Lambent, and you’re going to have them, too.”

“Ah, but we’re small and mobile, and we can even run to the mainland when we need to, but you’ve painted yourself into a corner on your little fortress island. Sitting ducks.”

Marcus didn’t react. He never did. He just had that look that said he was making a note of anything useful, a slow-motion nod. “So you accept that Lambent are taking out your boats, not us.”

“We fish too. We’ve found a couple.”

“Stalks as well?”

“The things that keep punching up through the ground? I hear they’re appearing all over the mainland now.”

“Okay,” Marcus said quietly. “So you think you can deal with this.”

“We can avoid it. That’s why we’re heading to Vectes, in case you thought we were mounting some armed landing. We’re getting our people out while we still can.”

“If this shit’s spreading, you’re going to run out of places to hide,” Marcus said.

Dom wasn’t sure if Marcus knew something he didn’t, or if he was doing something very un-Marcus—bluffing. He steeled himself to stand there like the dumb sidekick and not show any surprise. Ollivar stared Marcus out for a few seconds, but he was the first to blink—literally.

“What makes you say that?” he asked.

Marcus didn’t so much as twitch a muscle. “We’re monitoring the stalks that wrecked our rig. But if you think you can handle it on your own, fine—I’ll just thank you for getting your assholes off our case so we can work out how we stop these things.” He pressed his earpiece. “Fenix to KR Eight-Zero. Requesting pickup—we’re done here.”

Ollivar folded his arms, still doing the silent routine. Maybe that was the little tic that showed he wasn’t as relaxed about evading the Lambent as he claimed. Marcus hadn’t actually asked him to do anything; there was no reason for the I’m-not-playing body language. But then Marcus was just standing there with his arms at his sides, a little awkward, hands loosely clenched. Dom knew that was just because he didn’t know what to do with his hands when he wasn’t hugging his Lancer—but it might have come across to Ollivar as balling his fists for a fight. Marcus wasn’t always easy to read.

“Warn us when you’re ready to embark,” Marcus said. “So our navy knows you’re coming. You know how they are.”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to blow them all away for what they’re doing to your guys.”

“Love to,” Marcus said. “But I’ve got bigger problems than you. And you’ll all end up dead anyway.”

Gettner was now hovering overhead in a fierce downdraft. Barber lowered the sling on the winch.

“Shame about your rig,” Ollivar said. “If you’ve got any sense, you’ll fire up that navy of yours and get the hell off Vectes too.”

Dom thought about that all the way back to the naval base, arms folded and eyes shut so that nobody would start a conversation with him. He wasn’t sure he could face another upheaval. It had been bad enough running from Jacinto to Port Farrall and then to Vectes. There had to come a point where it was better to stand your ground and die rather than wandering the world scared shitless of what was around the next corner. He listened to Marcus talking to Hoffman on the radio, and got the impression that the colonel was digging in rather than thinking of evacuating.

What the hell else could he do with a whole city?

“Okay, Hoffman’s glad they’re going,” Marcus said, taking out his earpiece and scratching his ear. “We got something right. One less variable to factor in. Maybe they’ll be kind enough to leave us the rest of their explosives.”

“Were you acting?” Dom asked. “With Ollivar, I mean.”

Marcus just raised his shoulders a fraction. It wasn’t even a shrug. “I can’t act.”

“That’s probably why it convinced me.”

“What, that they’ll end up as dead as us?”

“Yeah.”

“He can chew on that for a while.” Marcus got up as the Raven flew low over the base perimeter. Half a dozen of the ancient bulldozers that had been taken out of mothballs to clear land for housing were parked in a line, and Gears were milling around them. “Looks like Hoffman really is digging in.”

Dom craned his neck. “What exactly are they doing? Did he say?”

“He just said that if it worked at Anvil Gate, it might work here.”

Hoffman never talked about Anvil Gate any more than Marcus or Dom talked about Aspho Fields. Dom assumed Hoffman’s reluctance was the same as his, born of a necessary thing that neither wanted to recall if they could avoid it. But the decorations and promotions tied to both events made damn sure nobody else ever forgot.

Hoffman had raised the specter himself, though. Maybe that meant he was dealing with his ghosts better than Dom was.

The old man was right. Some things were best faced head-on.

Ollivar’s piss-pot fleet hadn’t come inshore yet, but neither had any stalks or polyps. And there hadn’t been an incident of any kind involving the gangs. Hoffman felt that the world was holding its breath for some reason.

He hoped that it was just giving him time to complete the fortifications before all hell broke loose. It would make a change to being run ragged by unfolding disasters on a daily basis, always two steps behind where he needed to be. The ditches and pits around the northern boundary of the camp were now extensive enough to give everyone a feeling of security and decisive action, however misplaced that might turn out to be.

What if the stalks come up inside the wire?

What if we can’t channel the polyps into kill zones?

What if … this is really the time that I fail?

At least Dizzy Wallin was happy. He climbed up into the cab of his derrick—Betty, he called it—and started the engine. The huge machine shook convulsively before rumbling into life. Hoffman stood at the top of the ramparts formed from the excavated soil and found himself almost eye to eye with the man.

Dizzy ran his hands over the steering wheel as if he was soothing it. “Mornin’, sweetie,” he said to the rig. “Did you have a restful night? You ready to do a little work for Dizzy? That’s my girl.” He rested his elbow on the cab door. “You gotta treat the ladies right, Colonel. Show you appreciate ’em.”

Hoffman was pretty sure that Dizzy really was just referring to the derrick, and not taking a poke at his guilty conscience. All the drivers recruited via Operation Lifeboat—Prescott’s coyly named project for conscripting Stranded with the promise of aid for their families—had this fixation with their vehicles. Maybe creating a crazy game was the only thing that made the job bearable; that, and drinking, which Dizzy did plenty of.

So what? He gets the job done. Poor bastard. How he kills his liver is his business.

“They’re all ill-tempered when they first wake up,” Hoffman said. “Best to give them a wide berth until they’ve had a coffee and put their lipstick on.”

Dizzy roared with laughter. “Ain’t that the truth. Look, how do you know this trap is gonna work, sir? Maybe them polyp things is just too dumb to follow a trail o’ crumbs.”

“They’ll come at us, Wallin. We’re the crumbs.” I’ve done this before. I’ve presented my throat to the enemy. And then, when he’s come within reach—I’ve killed him. “Then we make sure we get them where we want them. We lure them. We herd them. Damn it, we even bulldoze them with Betty. But we get them in a killing zone, and we finish them.”

“Betty ain’t gonna like that much, sir.”

“She’s a tough old bird. Most women are. Don’t you worry about her.”

But even the tough ones sometimes don’t make it.

The whole site came to life as drivers, engineers, and laborers showed up to get on with the digging and leveling. Staff Sergeant Parry, the most experienced engineer left in the corps, scrambled up a bank of earth with Royston Sharle to pore over a map.

They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need Hoffman around. But he wanted to watch them for a while, just to be reassured that this wasn’t an insane waste of fuel and manpower when there was transport to maintain, houses to build, and crops to grow.

If they thought it was crazy, they’d tell him, one way or another. He was sure of that.

“Did you like digging holes in the garden as a boy, Victor?” Michaelson walked along the top of the hard-packed ramp. “I did. Buried my mother’s best porcelain teapot as pirate treasure once. She wasn’t delighted.”

“If you tell me that made you want to join the navy,” Hoffman said, “I might have to punch you.”

“Have you come clean with Prescott about how much fuel this is going to take?”

“He knows all the numbers. He also knows that if push comes to shove and we don’t use the fuel—the imulsion reserves won’t matter a damn.”

“So this is what you did at Anvil Gate.”

“It was. Except I didn’t dig any holes.”

“Somehow the words booby traps in the official reports didn’t quite give me the full picture.”

“I didn’t write it. COG Command didn’t like my version, for some reason.”

Yes, this was one of the ways that Hoffman had defended Anvil Gate. It was more the principle than the exact method, but it was age-old wisdom; if you feared you might be overrun and your outer defenses breached, you needed a way to make sure that the enemy regretted it. Entering your citadel had to mean death.

It was surprisingly easy to fight that way when the time came.

There was a territorial animal inside every human being—sometimes hardly hidden, sometimes so buried that even the individual didn’t know it was there—that would turn to blind savagery in defense of its home soil. Hoffman knew it was simply a matter of releasing it. Enemies pouring over your ramparts was a pretty good trigger.

“What if the stalks don’t show?” Michaelson asked.

“Then we’ve still got good fortifications,” Hoffman said. “Which won’t eat or drink anything, as Sergeant Mataki is fond of saying.”

“Is she talking to you yet?”

“Mataki?” Hoffman was all too aware that Bernie wasn’t happy. He’d have preferred a good bust-up to clear the air, but she seemed to be at loggerheads with something else, something internal; age, and her denial of it. If he hadn’t known her better he would have said she was suddenly scared of dying, which was an odd thing for a Gear who faced it every moment in her job. “She prefers the company of that goddamn dog. She even lets it sleep on her bed now. Damn thing growls at me.”

Michaelson gave him that indulgent look, an amused kind of sympathy. “It’s tempting to think we know what’s best for people.”

“That’s the nature of command, Quentin.”

“As long as we’re sure we’re not just doing what’s best for us. I wonder how you’ll take it when Prescott retires you. In the not-too-distant future, as well.”

“I haven’t retired Mataki. I’ve taken her off frontline duties while she’s recovering.” Hoffman was still trying to think of a way to climb down from his position without putting Bernie back in a job for which she was no longer fully fit. It didn’t preoccupy him as much as he felt it should have. It had become a worry he fitted in around the main business of the day, and he almost heard Margaret’s voice asking him when he planned to divorce her and marry the army. “If and when we face an attack, I’ll deploy her to Pelruan to support Lieutenant Stroud.”

Hoffman braced for a lecture on sending the womenfolk to safety, but Michaelson said nothing. He knew all the various histories and complications by now. Hoffman grabbed the opportunity for a change of topic.

“Baird thinks polyps won’t climb vertical walls well. So we get them in the pits and we blow the crap out of them. Or we burn them. Either way—they do not come out again.”

“But we don’t know where the stalks will emerge.”

“No, but we know the last place we want the polyps to go—toward humans.” Hoffman tapped Michaelson’s chest with his forefinger. The captain had taken to wearing the lighter naval armor, which somehow changed him from raffish to quietly menacing. The man had commanded amphibious special forces and it suddenly showed. “You just keep them away from the shore side.”

“Okay, you’ve convinced me utterly.”

“What else am I going to do, sit on my ass and do nothing because I can’t predict what’s going to happen?”

“No, I mean it.” Michaelson caught his shoulder and turned him around to walk back to the gates of the naval base. “I haven’t got a better idea. I’m falling back on what I know, just like you. Shore battery. Big guns. Torpedoes. Depth charges. Because nobody’s ever had to fight something that can appear pretty well anywhere and dump troops in your lap. It’s like fighting ghosts.”

It was absolutely the right word, and yet Hoffman found himself hunching his shoulders as if hearing it physically hurt.

Sometimes Hoffman saw the naval base’s gun battery as an historic but effective piece of artillery, but sometimes it was a reminder that Anvil Gate had to be faced and put to rest. There was only so long a man could obsess over his past. Everyone here had sleep-wrecking memories that would never leave them, and maybe his would look nothing special if he could experience the traumas of others.

I’m just an ordinary man. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a monster. This is where I stop beating myself up.

If he was going to be doomed to relive the siege of Anvil Gate, then he would make it work for him, not against him. He chose to see it as a training run for an even more critical battle. He would make himself think differently.

Doesn’t that make a mockery of all the lives lost? Does anyone deserve to burn to death? Does anyone deserve to be shot for trying to save their loved ones?

Hoffman decided that ends did justify means, and it was a decision he’d taken unconsciously when he enlisted more than forty years ago. The essence of soldiering was doing something bad to stop something even worse. This time, the end was saving what little was left of his world, and Anvil Gate was helping him do it.

“Yeah, ghosts, Quentin. Goddamn ghosts.”

Prescott was holding a public meeting over in the main housing zone. He expected his minions to show solidarity, even Trescu, and Hoffman was prepared to indulge him if it meant a quiet life. He was still the lawful chairman under the Fortification Act, which had never been repealed. And he still believed utterly in his right and capacity to govern. Hoffman could see it in every jut of the chin and squaring of the shoulders. The man wasn’t floundering, and he wasn’t out of ideas. He wasn’t hapless; he wasn’t a clueless bureaucrat. He just seemed to have his mind on something even more pressing. Sometimes Prescott reminded Hoffman of a man who knew he was going to fire his staff, but still made an effort to behave impeccably right up to the moment he showed them the door.

He was also a goddamn liar. He lied the regular way, and he lied by omission. Hoffman still wondered how much classified material Prescott kept from him. Prescott fed him information that he desperately needed a crumb at a time even when Jacinto was facing its final attack, even after the damn city had been sunk.

He’s a politician. He’s a politician who still isn’t scared enough to tell me the truth and ask for help.

There was quite a crowd at the fire muster point. The open space had become the informal town square in this section. Prescott walked casually into the crowd, his close protection Gears a little way behind him, and dominated the gathering just by the way he stood. The crowd was mainly Old Jacinto citizens, but there were also quite a few ex-Stranded—what a goddamn joke—and Gorasni. Trescu arrived late.

“I often wonder who the Chairman feels his security detail needs to protect him from most.” Michaelson feigned a turn to look toward Trescu, but whispered in Hoffman’s ear. “The Jacinto mob, the assorted riffraff, or us.”

I wish I could find a crass motive. Money. Power. Greatness. Whatever. But he’s got absolute power, money means damn all now, and there’s nobody left to parade his status to. He really believes it all. He really does think he’s been chosen by fate to save humanity.

That was what made a politician really dangerous. There was no common animal motive for the likes of Hoffman or any other man to understand.

“We’ve faced the unknown before,” Prescott said to the crowd. “Many times. Things we couldn’t even begin to imagine existed. But we survived it all. We’ve seen nightmarish things, we’ve come through a terrible war—”

“Ephyra might have come through it,” a Gorasni voice yelled. “But the rest of the planet—we burned, thanks to you, Mister Chairman Prescott. Even your allies.”

“Ahhh,” Michaelson said. “I wondered how long it would take for someone to point that out. They did awfully well to ignore that elephant for so long, didn’t they?”

Trescu piled straight in. He was just a few strides from the heckler, and he simply walked over and cuffed him hard across the back of the head.

“I don’t ask you to forgive, and I don’t ask you to forget.” Trescu turned to the Gorasni crowd. “But I demand that you focus on what will save our lives. We have a new war coming. You don’t need to resurrect another old one.”

Hoffman caught yet another glimpse of what made Gorasnaya willing to follow Trescu into a deal few of them seemed to want. Damn it, he admired the man. Disliking him was a totally separate issue.

Prescott seemed unruffled by the interruption. “I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t had to do terrible things. And I won’t lie to you and tell you we’ll defeat the Lambent. I don’t know if we can, any more than I knew if we could beat the Locust. All I can do is point to the fact that we’re still thriving in the face of overwhelming odds. We can do the impossible.”

A handful of people clapped. Then the smattering of applause picked up pace, and within seconds Prescott was being cheered by most of the crowd. The bastard had the touch, he definitely did.

Ends justify means. I shoot people: he lies.

But he hadn’t. Prescott had actually leveled with the civvies.

“I’ve had it with moral relativity,” Hoffman said. “Come on, Quentin. Let’s get back to CIC.” He beckoned to Trescu as he passed. “You too, Commander.”

One of the windows of the main CIC room looked out over the sea. Hoffman could see lookouts with their field glasses trained on the horizon, and two radar picket boats dragging white wakes as they patrolled the inshore limits. A Raven hovered low over the water about five klicks out to dunk its sonar buoy. If anything was heading this way through the water, they’d probably detect it.

Probably.

“No movement with Ollivar’s flotilla, then?” Michaelson asked. “And do you ever leave this office?”

“No to both questions, sir.” Mathieson pushed his chair away from the desk for a moment to grab a pencil from another one. “I like it here.”

“They’re waiting for something,” Trescu said. “I cannot imagine why.”

“I take it you’re handing back Nial and his father.”

Trescu shrugged. “Not my prisoners. Your call, Colonel.”

It was suddenly a tough decision. The Stranded were leaving. From a security point of view, the bombers would no longer be a threat, but they were responsible—perhaps personally, individually—for the deaths of both Gears and Gorasni. Hoffman’s sense of justice demanded that they didn’t walk away free men. And yet it seemed pointless to hold prisoners right now.

He found himself almost wishing that Trescu had solved the problem the 9 mm way and not told him until afterward. And he wasn’t proud that he could even think it.

“Sir?” Mathieson, listening on his headset, beckoned to Hoffman. “Ollivar’s vessels are moving into the MEZ. Quite a few more hulls than we’d imagined—the Stranded contingent here must be bigger than we thought. He wants to talk to you.”

“Tell him to cut the crap and get his people out. That was the deal.” Hoffman dreaded having to let the two surviving bombers go and then explaining that to Bernie, or any other Gear for that matter. “Tell him no torpedoes up the ass this time, if that’s what he’s worried about.”

Mathieson went off the channel for a moment. “Sir, he’s insistent.”

One last gloat about the end of the COG. They can never resist it. “Very well. Patch him through.”

“Hoffman? Tell us where you need us,” Ollivar said.

“You arrange your own RV point, Ollivar.”

“No, we’re landing troops,” Ollivar said. “And don’t think this is some heart-of-gold moralizing shit where I do the heroic forgiveness thing because I don’t want to descend to your level. This is just survival. We’ll fight those things with you, because if we don’t, they’ll just come for us after they’ve wiped you off the map.”

Well, shit. Hoffman would need every rifle, lookout, and pair of hands he could get. His honor didn’t feel compromised and he didn’t feel the need to consult Prescott.

I’m a warfighter. I’m here to win. What else is there to worry about except whether humankind is still here tomorrow, next week, next year?

The only thing he balked at was hearing these scum call themselves soldiers. But he’d swallow that for the time being.

Trescu shrugged. “About time they put something useful into the fight. Go on. Let them.”

Hoffman went as his gut guided him and pressed his earpiece to answer. “Okay, Ollivar, you might want to spread your vessels around,” he said. “In case we lose the docks. Other than that—disembark your men at the jetty next to the carriers, and Sergeant Fenix will meet you. We have a plan.”

Michaelson had plenty of free berths. He gave Hoffman a thumbs-up.

“Oh, good,” Ollivar said sourly. “All square-jawed noble infantry stuff.”

“No,” said Hoffman. “Dirty warfare. As dirty as it gets.”

The Lambent were the kind of enemy he preferred. There were no rules of engagement for absolute, literal monsters.

All he had to do was wipe them out and forget they ever existed. They would never nag at his conscience.

They needed anything that would burn.

In a world of desperate shortages, Dom had learned never to throw anything away. There was no garbage. There were only things that had to be reused, from fabric to old cooking oil to human waste for fertilizer. Food scraps went to the pigs and chickens; used paper was pulped and bleached repeatedly until the end product was useless for writing on. Then it would be shredded for insulation or made into ragged, uneven pieces of bathroom tissue. The idea of finding stuff specifically for burning was a whole new habit to learn.

Dom explored the warren of stores cut into the rock under the naval base, feeling vaguely uneasy in the way he did when he entered tunnels. At least he had a rational reason now. The grubs might have been gone, but a stalk that could come up in the middle of a new volcanic island could do exactly the same right here.

“Hey, Marcus? You down here?”

Dom’s voice echoed. The tunnels and chambers leading off them were built along the same lines as the ones under Port Farrall, probably because they dated from the same era. There were plenty of old ammo crates that would burn well with a little tar. There would probably be all kinds of stuff soaked in oils and lubricants, too. It would all go up in smoke easily enough.

“In here,” Marcus called. “End of the tunnel through the painted doors. Don’t go right.”

Dom found Marcus in a storeroom lined from floor to ceiling with shelves full of box folders with damp-faded labels on the spine. Marcus was sitting on an upturned box, rifling through piles of papers.

“Archives,” he said. “Some of these date back centuries.”

Dom peered at the labels along the shelves. The ink on most of them had faded to gray and sepia, and the handwritten dates and titles were sloping and ornate, the formal penmanship of another era. The files were carefully arranged by year.

“Okay, this would burn great,” Dom said carefully. “But I’d feel really bad about it.”

“Me too. Shit. Imagine what’s in here.”

It was just as well Baird wasn’t down here. The archives were probably full of all kinds of engineering detail. He would have gone berserk at the idea of setting fire to it. Dom felt like a vandal for even thinking about it.

“We could leave it,” Dom said. “Loads of wood and other combustibles down here.”

Marcus didn’t answer. He’d picked up a bound book about fifty centimeters across—an old ledger with a leather cover and a gold-blocked title. When he balanced it on his knee to open it, Dom read VISITOR SECURITY LOG on the cover. Marcus leafed through the pages and then stopped for a moment.

“Shit,” he said.

That could have meant anything from the end of the world to pleasant surprise. Dom guessed it wasn’t the latter.

“What is it?”

Marcus didn’t answer. He just moved on to the next pile of paper, leaving the visitor log open on the floor. Dom squatted to take a look.

It was about halfway down the list, a name written in careful block capitals and then followed by a signature in a different and more confident hand. The date beside it was more than twenty years old.

NAME: FENIX, DR. A.

VISITING: MAJ. SHARMAN, COB 3. EXT: 665.

Dom knew Marcus’s father had visited Vectes when it was a bioweapons research facility, and so did Marcus. The mayor of Pelruan had told them. But that wasn’t quite the same as seeing your dead father’s handwriting, unexpected and out of context. That kind of reminder of the dead punched above its weight.

Adam Fenix’s life was a disjointed series of snapshots that Marcus still seemed to be putting together from things that popped up where he least expected them, from small personal stuff like this to finding those unexplained audio recordings in the Locust computer. Adam Fenix never told his son things, and even lied about others—by omission, yes, but that was still lying as far as Dom was concerned, and he knew Marcus felt the same. It was years before Marcus found out why his mother had gone missing. His father had kept it from him. Dom knew the Fenix family as well as anyone could, and it still shocked him that a man could hide so much from his son, his only child. Dom would never have done anything like that to Benedicto. He was damned sure of it.

“You okay, Marcus?” he said.

“Yeah.” It was a rasping sigh as much as anything. “Even when he’s dead, I still get surprises.”

Dom would have torn out the page and kept it if it had been his own father’s handwriting. It would have been the last precious link to the man himself, something he had touched and shaped. Marcus just picked up the book, closed it, and put it to one side.

“So what else have we got?” he said, as if nothing had happened. “Anyone collecting the wood shavings from the lumberyard?”

They’d been as close as brothers since childhood. Dom knew Marcus as well as he’d ever known anyone. But sometimes Dom still had to stop himself asking the one question he knew Marcus would never answer: Do you want to talk about it?

Marcus never wanted to talk about anything. It would have been pointless to ask. If he needed to, he knew by now that Dom was always there.

“I’ll go see what we’re piling up,” Dom said. “Someone’s got to stop them burning the bathroom tissue. A guy has his limits.”

Marcus jogged down the passage ahead of him. “Got to brief Ollivar’s irregulars with Hoffman.”

He disappeared down the dimly lit tunnel. Dom heard his boots clatter up the stone steps to the ground floor.

Reminders of the dead were everywhere, even the ones that you were sure didn’t affect you any longer. In the locker room later that afternoon, Dom caught sight of his tattoo in the mirror—a heart with Maria’s name on it. Even if he could have had it removed, he wouldn’t have. But it felt all wrong now, as if he was still pretending she wasn’t dead, like the occasional days when he still felt the urge to do what he’d done for ten solid years—to take out her picture and show it to anyone who might recognize her and tell him that they’d seen her.

There was no single act of closure, he knew. He knew it from the deaths of his kids, and his parents, and pretty well everyone he’d grown up with. It was a gradual process for him. He had Maria’s necklace; now he needed to move on another step and deal with the tattoo.

He changed into his civvie clothes and went looking for Sam. She was taking a break in the mess, drinking with Dizzy. It was nice to see them getting on.

“I hear you’re pretty good with ink,” he said.

Sam gave him that sideways look. “Yes. You want something done?”

“I think so.”

“So—traditional Kashkuri stuff? South Islander?”

“Can you change an existing tattoo?”

Sam looked thoughtful. “Possibly. Depends.”

“You gonna need some of Doctor Wallin’s special anesthetic?” Dizzy held out a small bottle of moonshine. “Guarantee you won’t feel a thing if she saws your damn head off.”

“I’ll get numb later,” Dom said. “Thanks, Dizzy.”

“Okay.” Sam slid off the seat and beckoned Dom to follow. “Better do it now, before we both chicken out. I’ll get my stuff.”

Dom found a storeroom in the barracks. He didn’t want anyone watching, even by accident. He rolled his sleeve back as far as he could and offered his right biceps.

“Okay, you’re going to have to talk me through this,” Sam said, opening a small bag like a cosmetic case. “What exactly do you want done?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But she’s gone, and I need to mark that somehow.”

Dom knew that Sam’s up-yours attitude wasn’t the whole woman. Somebody named after a dead-hero father they’d never known would understand all the confusing, painful feelings that Dom still carried around with him. Sam studied the stylized heart and then nodded.

“You ready to trust me on this, Dom?”

“Go ahead.”

It took a long time without a powered needle and it hurt more than he remembered. He didn’t want to watch her do it, either. When he finally looked, not knowing what effect it would have on him but knowing he wanted something to change, it made his throat tighten.

Sam really was good at this kind of thing. Gifted, in fact.

The tattoo and all it stood for had been transformed. If Dom hadn’t known it had once been a heart, he would only have seen the angel cradling Maria’s name, wings folded, eyes raised toward something infinite and certain.

He couldn’t have told Sam what he wanted. But somehow it felt like he’d seen it that way from the start. He’d wear his sleeves rolled down for a couple of days to hide the dressing, not that anyone would have pestered him with questions about it.

“I owe you,” he said.

Sam turned in the doorway. “No, you don’t,” she said. “That’s for making my day.”

The base was now settling into a quiet waiting game. The sound of vehicle motors and grinding gearboxes continued late into the evening, throwing up a halo of hazy light beyond the ancient walls as the diggers raced to complete the network of pits and trenches. The only ships moving were the NCOG patrols. Even the Ravens were few and far between. Dom sat on a bollard by the jetty, watching navigation lights pass overhead and the black patch of helicopter-shaped nothing as one of the birds blotted out the stars.

“We love this, don’t we, baby?” Cole walked up and stood contemplating the docks with him. “At our best when we’re waitin’ for the shit to start. All match-fit and ready to go.”

“Wonder when we’ll ever shake that off.”

“Wonder when we’re ever gonna get the chance.”

“Where’s Baird?”

“Weldin’ shit. Pipes. So they can flood the pits with fuel and bake some glowie crab. Man, that boy’s creative in all the wrong ways. But I ain’t complainin’.”

“What are the civvies going to do if it all kicks off? We haven’t got enough spare rifles to arm one percent of them, even if they knew how to use them.”

“Then we better make sure we stop the glowies. That’s all we got.”

No point evacuating the civvies inland, because the stalks can come up any damn place. No point making them rough it in the woods, because they’ll be even more afraid and disoriented. No point doing anything except wait—because we just don’t know what’s coming around the corner, or even if it’s coming at all.

The next day was quiet, too, and the next, and the day after that. Dom did perimeter patrols as normal, and rode with the twice-daily Raven recon flight. Clement and Zephyr were paired up now, doing a sonar sweep around the island.

There was no sign of stalks or polyps. It was almost as if they’d tested out the COG, found they got a kicking, and moved on elsewhere.

But Dom didn’t believe that a life-form that could give the grubs nightmares would quit that easily. The most he could hope for was that if they were as dumb and instinct-driven as some thought, then they’d latched on to some other scent. But it would just be a temporary respite, like all the other quiet moments in the war.

The bastards were just getting their breath back.

Meanwhile, the coastline to the west was crawling with extra Stranded. Bernie walked the perimeter with Mac most of the day, Lancer slung across her chest and her Longshot on her back, making it clear that it wasn’t polyps she was keeping an eye open for. Dom waved to her from the ’Dill’s hatch as it headed back through the main camp. She gave him a meaningful nod.

“I just hope she doesn’t cap anyone,” Dom said to Baird.

“What?”

Dom dipped down inside the cabin. Baird was driving, listening to two radio channels at once.

“I said, I hope Bernie doesn’t shoot any more Stranded and start a riot.”

“Killjoy. What else has she got left at her time of life, except mutilating assholes and giving Hoffman a gruesome time?”

“Baird, shut up, will you?”

“Hey, want to listen to the submarine net? I rigged my radio so I can hear their transmissions.”

“Damn, you’re stalking those boats.”

Baird just shrugged. He parked the ’Dill in the compound and stayed in the driver’s seat, listening to the chatter. Dom decided that was how he coped with being scared—making things and staying busy the whole time, as if that gave him some control over his fate in a chaotic world. Dom hung back for a moment, trying to think of something placatory to say. It was really hard to do the buddy thing with Baird.

“Whales,” Baird said.

“What?”

“Zephyr’s reporting a pod of whales singing on the hydrophone.”

“Well, that’s nice and relaxing for them.”

Baird frowned. He was concentrating on something, not even looking at Dom. Then he sat upright.

“Shit,” he said. “Unidentified biologic.”

“Stalks?”

“No, something swimming, uncatalogued. They’ve pinged it with the sonar.”

“Isn’t that going to piss it off?”

“Pissing it off is better than not seeing it coming.” Baird just sat there, listening. Dom watched his expression change. “Squid, maybe.”

“Leviathan.” A few months ago, a leviathan was the worst thing Dom could imagine finding underwater. They were another act in the grub freak show, a whale-sized mountain of scaly flesh with teeth and lethal tentacles. Now he was seeing it as preferable to the stalk and polyp combo. At least leviathans stuck to the water. “Hey, they understand how big those things are, don’t they?”

Baird fiddled with the radio. The channel he was listening to suddenly burst over the ’Dill’s speaker, a conversation between a Gorasni and Tyran voices.

“Clement, we still have the biologic. Bearing zero-eight-five, depth sixty meters. Moving above us.”

“Roger that, Zephyr. Clement to KR-Six-Seven, unknown biologic approximately ten kilometers south of you. I’m trying to get a side scan. Stand by.”

“They ought to make me an admiral,” Baird muttered. He’d been bragging all week about how great his sonar gizmo was. “A commodore, at least.”

It took a few moments for Clement to come back on the net. The voice was Commander Garcia’s; steady, but definitely not relaxed this time.

“Well … that’s a face only a mother could love,” he said. “Tentacles … whale-sized … I’ll assume that’s a leviathan. Moving north to Vectes. Signal all inshore vessels to return to harbor and stand by.”

“Great,” Dom said. “Maybe it’ll wrestle the stalks.”

“Knowing our luck,” Baird said, “it’ll lose.”