CHAPTER 15

Bernie checked the Packhorse’s rearview mirror to make sure Sam Byrne was still following on the bike. Every time she glanced up, she expected to find that Sam had peeled off in search of something more demanding than guarding a fishing village.

Don’t blame you, girl. I don’t like being packed off to a safe billet when there’s real work I could do, either.

“Going home to your dad, Mac,” she said. The dog sat in the passenger seat beside her, occasionally sticking his muzzle out the open window. “He’ll be pleased to see you. You’ll forget all about me, won’t you?”

“Your channel’s open,” Sam said.

Bernie didn’t care. “So I talk to the dog. I get more sense out of him than I do most humans.” She switched the radio to standby. “Let’s see how Anya’s been getting on.”

Pelruan depressed Bernie more every time she saw it. It got her down because it was picturesque and peaceful, even with the ditches and razor wire that Rossi’s squad had put around its boundaries. It should have been left alone to carry on in happy ignorance in its grub-free backwater. Some Gears—and civvies—felt it was high time the locals understood what the rest of Sera had endured for so long, but some just felt sorry for the poor bewildered bastards.

Yeah, I do. I wouldn’t have taken this half as well as they have.

Anya was waiting for her when she drove up to the collection of huts that served as the barracks and admin office. She really did look a lot like her mother these days, especially now that she’d taken to wearing armor. She glanced past the Packhorse for a moment as Sam roared to a halt on the bike.

Bernie opened the vehicle door for Mac. He jumped out and inspected Anya’s boots for interesting scents. “How are you, ma’am?”

“All very quiet.” Anya kept a wary eye on Mac. “Rossi’s a safe pair of hands, so I haven’t screwed up and started any riots yet. I hear we’ve got some interesting wildlife around.”

“Stalks? Stranded?”

“Leviathan. Haven’t you heard?”

“I’ve only been monitoring my own channel on the way here.” There was no reason for Bernie to be flashed with a message like that anyway, but she still felt discarded and irrelevant. “Anything I need to know?”

“The submarines just pinged one. All vessels have been ordered back to berth and all crews ashore. I’ve just been recalling the fishing boats.”

“I didn’t realize they were still working.”

“They do some line fishing close to the shore.” Anya indicated down the road. “You’ve got a choice of billet, by the way. Will Berenz or Ellen’s bar.”

“Well, that’s an easy one, isn’t it, Mac?” Bernie grabbed her backpack and set off. She knew the way. The dog trotted ahead of her. “See you in the signals office in about half an hour, ma’am.”

Sam surveyed the narrow streets between the wooden houses as they walked. “This would really burn.”

“What?”

“I always think that when I see wooden buildings. They burn too easily. My mother always told me how Anvegad burned.” Sam looked embarrassed for a moment. That wasn’t like her at all. “Funny how things take root in your mind.”

Hoffman still hadn’t finished telling Bernie about Anvil Gate. There was always something that interrupted, and they hadn’t had a moment on their own in days. Maybe he’d forget all about it. And maybe Sam knew enough to fill in the gaps.

The older Bernie got, the more the past became her most vivid focus. Maybe the past really did matter that much, or maybe that was just the way the brain aged, giving up trying to access the short-term stuff and seeking comfort and vindication in the memories it had put away safely years ago.

And then there were parts of the past that simply wouldn’t let go even when she wanted to run from them. They were all around her now in this tourist-brochure fishing village. There was a war memorial in the middle of the well-trimmed grass square outside the town hall, a square-section tapered granite pillar with the Coalition’s cog-and-eagle emblem on top.

Bernie always paused to stand to attention and bow her head at any memorial she passed. Every Gear of her generation did. It was automatic. If she had time, she would stop and read the names carved there, too, because that was the whole point: that these men and women were never forgotten, even if their families and friends were long gone. Names mattered. They needed seeing and saying.

Nobody’s ever really dead unless we forget them. That was what Cole always said.

Sam stopped beside her. From the corner of her eye, Bernie could see her shuffle uncertainly, as if she’d never done this, and then follow Bernie’s lead. Mac stopped too.

The regiments represented were mainly the Duke of Tollen’s and the Andius Fusiliers, with a few NCOG Corps of Marines. Someone had tied a sash in Tollen colors around the column and laid a laurel wreath topped with the Tollen badge at its foot. Bernie had passed the memorial before and not seen the sash, so she wondered if it had been put there for some local anniversary or specific battle commemoration she wasn’t aware of. Then Sam nudged her elbow.

“They really don’t like the Gorasni, do they?” she said.

It took Bernie a few moments to see what Sam was looking at. Someone had left a card on the wreath, neatly handwritten, and she squatted to read it.

“Prescott better scrub the joint parade for the Day of the Fallen, then,” Bernie said. “He tends to think people can kiss and make up.”

Sam stared at the card for a few moments, then saluted and walked away.

“Who did you lose?” she asked. “Particularly, I mean.”

Everyone had lost almost everybody they cared about. If someone asked that question, they wanted to know which death still gnawed at you most.

“Hard to say,” Bernie said. “Depends on the day. Sometimes it’s my brother, because we never got on. Mostly it’s Gears I served with. I don’t have that many special ghosts. I’m lucky.”

Sam made a noncommittal hfff sound. Yes, Bernie knew she was lucky; she didn’t lie awake at night thinking what might have been about the dead. The only thought that plagued her now was dying before she saw things on Sera starting to improve.

“You’ve spoiled that dog,” Will Berenz said, opening the front door. “Look at him. He’s put on weight.”

“He works hard. He needs to keep his strength up.” Bernie bent over and cuddled Mac, then made sure that Sam was out of earshot. “Everything okay here?”

“If you’re asking how Lieutenant Stroud’s coping, she’s very efficient. People here trust her. Good start.”

“I realize they’re unhappy about the various allies we’ve had to make. But there’s some serious trouble out there now. We need every rifle we can get.”

Berenz looked crushed, as if he didn’t need reminding. “We were on borrowed time for so long, weren’t we?”

“Will, we’re going to survive.” Bernie gripped his shoulder to make her point. “I don’t know how, but we’re going to beat this. Okay?”

She had no idea why she said that, other than she desperately wanted to believe it. Everyone on the island had beaten incredible odds just to stay alive, though. It wasn’t unreasonable to think they could keep doing it.

“Okay,” Berenz said. “You’d tell me if we were beaten. I know you would.”

There was a fine line between strengthening morale and giving people false hope, but Bernie was never sure on which side of it she fell on any given day. When she got back to the signals office with Sam, Drew Rossi was monitoring the radio, nursing a cup of coffee that looked stone cold. They made the drink from some kind of roasted barley. Bernie wasn’t sure she remembered what real coffee tasted like anymore, but she was pretty sure it didn’t taste like that.

Rossi looked up. “A faraway island’s a great idea until somebody finds it, isn’t it? And then it’s just somewhere you’re stuck with nowhere to run.”

“Very uplifting, Drew. You should join Baird’s morale committee.”

“So what brings you two ladies up here?”

“Banished to the soft option,” Sam said. “With the rest of you girls.”

Rossi took it in his stride. He was a likeable man, just another Gear who took refuge in griping. “No stalks yet, then. So far, the biggest task is keeping the fishermen inshore. They’re sliding further out a few meters at a time.”

“Okay, with the assorted wildlife on the loose out there, you’re going to want us on patrol, yes?”

Rossi tapped his temple in a mock salute. “Yes, Sergeant.”

“Come on, Drew, I’m not trying to out-sergeant you. I’m just not used to being the spare prick at the wedding.”

“Hey, no problem.” He cocked his head to one side. “If it was the other way around, you’d stick him at a desk, too. We all get to the point where we can’t face losing one more person we care about. Shit, even the ones we don’t care about. Anybody.”

Rossi didn’t have to say who “he” was. The army was a gossip shop, and the smaller it got, the less escaped its attention. Bernie went off to start the route around town, Sam following.

“I’ll monitor the local net,” Sam said. “You keep an ear on Control.”

There was one advantage to patrolling Pelruan—visibility. It was small, low-rise, and there were a couple of points around the place where you had a panoramic view of the whole town. And there was no underground city of tunnels to worry about, either. If anything popped up here, they’d see it right away.

It’s just a question of what we can do about it if it does. Twenty Gears, some dogs, and a mostly unarmed population that’s never fought a grub, let alone dealt with Lambent. Great.

To the western side of the town, there was a flat-topped cliff the Ravens sometimes used as a landing pad. The view from there had almost no blind spots. Rossi’s squad had built a small observation post up there as shelter against the constant wind. Bernie and Sam walked up the long slope and stood there for a while, familiarizing themselves with the detail below.

Sam turned to face the sea. “Shit. If I turn at this angle, it looks as if there’s nothing left on Sera except the ocean.”

“Lonely spot.”

“Yes.” Sam raised her binoculars. “It is.”

Life went on below, probably the same as it had for decades except for the defensive ditches and garlands of razor wire put in place to deter a two-legged enemy. Bernie found herself looking south and wondering if she’d ever want to go home to Galangi again.

“Hey, Bernie, take a look.”

Bernie turned and followed Sam’s line of sight out to sea. She strained to spot the outline of a stalk, but there was nothing like that out there.

“What is it?”

Sam handed her the binoculars. “Line up with the pile of fishing floats on the slipway and elevate fifty degrees. Track right to left.”

Bernie didn’t see anything at first, then Sam said, “There it is again,” and the movement passed in front of her focus.

Something was swimming out there at a leisurely pace, breaking the water in a slow, wavelike motion like a porpoise. It could have been porpoises, of course. There was a lot more regular life in the ocean now that most of the human population had been wiped out. Those two ratios seemed to go hand in hand. But the longer Bernie looked, the more she decided it was a single large creature, and it wasn’t a whale.

She lowered the binoculars and got on the radio. “Control, this is Mataki at Pelruan. Contact—possible leviathan, two to three kilometers offshore. Might be the same one, if they can move that fast, or it might be its mate. Have you still got a fix on yours?”

“Negative, Clement lost contact with it,” Mathieson said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “I just let Stroud know. She’s making sure everyone’s back on dry land.”

The warning sirens positioned around the town let out three long, wailing bursts, sparking a flurry of activity. Nobody seemed to be out fishing, but crews ran down to the beach to haul the shore-launched boats farther up the pebbles. There was nothing they could do about the trawlers moored in the harbor. The fishermen just had to hope the leviathan didn’t venture into shallower water.

Bernie tried to locate the creature again, but she couldn’t see it. That was the problem with looking away from the sea for a few moments. Sam shook her head.

“No idea where it’s gone,” she said. “They must have escaped from the Locust tunnels when we flooded Jacinto. They’re making the most of their freedom.”

Bernie had never thought about monsters that way before. But half the creatures the COG had come across back on the land seemed to be dumb animals that the Locust had adapted for their own use, all kinds of things that probably didn’t have the brains on their own to plan attacks on humans. When she stopped to think about it, it was nightmarish.

Mac was back with Berenz, probably dozing in his kennel or just being a dog with the rest of the pack. She wondered if grubs grew fond of their beasts and let them sleep on their beds—did they even have beds?—then set off down the slope to walk around the harbor.

The coast around Pelruan was all headlands and bays, getting steeper and more spectacular further from the town. Bernie was starting to imagine a life where they never went to sea or left the island, a life pretty much like the one she’d known as a child. She stood looking out to sea, ten meters up the beach, and heard a distant helicopter over the sound of the waves hitting the pebbles.

Movement in the water caught her eye. She scanned the choppy water. A column of dark, shiny scales rose from nowhere out of the waves, so fast and silent that she froze for a second and couldn’t take in what she was looking at. Then it crashed down on the water like a breaching whale, raining spray on the beach. She’d aimed her rifle before her brain had worked out what the thing was.

Sam inhaled sharply, backing away with her Lancer raised. “Shit.”

“Where is it?” Bernie got her voice back. “Where’d it go?”

Leviathans stuck to the water. Dom said they had tentacles, so as long as she kept well clear of the waterline, it was fine. It was okay. It wasn’t coming ashore. It wasn’t a stalk.

“There.” Sam pointed. The tip of a tentacle lashed out of the sea. “Bravo Control, this is Byrne—we’ve got a leviathan inshore, in the harbor. Anyone got a really fucking big harpoon?”

“Bravo Control to Byrne, I’m calling in a KR unit. Stand by.”

The tentacle rose out of the water again, and then the head followed. It was the first clue Bernie had that things had gone even worse than horribly wrong. It was bad enough seeing the open maw for the first time. But there were luminous blisters on the thing’s face, like lights, and then all the scales shook off the huge tentacle and landed on the shingle like the creature had shaken off a terrible infestation of lice.

Except they weren’t lice. They were dog-sized and they scuttled up the shore.

Bernie hadn’t seen a live polyp before. Baird’s descriptions and the grainy recon pictures that one of the Ravens had taken on the imulsion rig didn’t cement the thing in her mind. She wondered what the hell all these crabs were doing coming up the beach, and then reality kicked in. They were knee-high. And even in broad daylight, she could see the luminescence. She opened fire into the seething mass, setting off detonations that splattered the things everywhere. Sam went wide and opened fire to stop them swarming past and surrounding her.

Stalks. They’re supposed to come out of the stalks.

Where are the frigging stalks?

“Sam, fall back! Call Rossi!” Bernie wasn’t sure if her mike was open or which Control could hear her now. “Tell him the bloody polyps are here, no stalks, just a leviathan—a Lambent one.”

Bernie emptied her magazine into the polyps, then turned and sprinted to the quayside to get some height over them, reloading as she went. She was only concentrating on the ranks of creatures right in front of her. She couldn’t see if there was an endless stream of them, but she could hear Sam running along the pebbles and firing long bursts. All Bernie knew was that if she stopped and looked away from that squirming carpet of legs and fangs, if she lost her concentration for a moment, she’d be dead.

Suddenly more automatic fire started up from her right. She had to reload, and when she let herself look up for a second she saw Rossi, Anya, three helmeted Gears she couldn’t recognize, and a few of the locals with shotguns, all letting rip into the invasion of polyps.

“KR-Three-Three inbound,” said a voice in her earpiece. “Bravo Control, if you folks in the harbor want to thin out, we’ll hose them from here.”

It was Eldon Rorry and his door gunner, Braley. You could always rely on the Raven crews, Bernie thought. The helicopter banked over her head—low enough for her to see the ammo belt in detail and the reflection off Dav Braley’s goggles—and hovered on the seaward side of the polyp invasion. Everyone ran for it. Bernie took cover behind a stack of cable drums that wouldn’t have stopped a round at all, and then she saw for herself just how lethal the polyps were.

Braley kept up a stream of fire on the polyps below. But a tentacle rose slowly out of the water. Bernie yelled and waved frantically to get the crew’s attention, expecting the tentacle to lift and smash the chopper down into the harbor, but instead it simply flicked as if it was shaking off water. A mass of polyps was catapulted into the crew bay. One went clean through and skidded out the other side, but the rest—

The explosion sent a fireball high into the air.

Bernie’s instinct was to duck as metal fragments and whirling chunks of rotor blade shot in all directions. It took her a couple of seconds to look up, hoping it would be a mistake and there’d still be a Raven hovering there, but there wasn’t. There was just burning fuel on the water, a lot of smoke, and the tail section slowly turning in the sea before it sank.

But she went on firing. Instinct took over as it always did, and she simply found her targets and killed them until she ran out of ammo and had to reload. She couldn’t stop, not even for dead friends.

The firing around her eventually slowed to a stop. The shore fell absolutely silent except for screeching gulls, and she was still too flooded with adrenaline to take in the bigger picture, but she focused on the shocked, chalk-white faces of Rossi and Anya.

“Ahh fuck.” Rossi turned to Anya. “Lieutenant, we have to sink that leviathan before it lands more polyps.”

“Where is it?” Bernie said. “Where the hell has the thing gone?”

It was typical, shitty, rotten luck.

They were ready for an attack at New Jacinto. Now the first strike was at the other end of the island. Baird had been convinced that the assorted Lambent menagerie was following imulsion in the water, and maybe it was, but it had followed it to the least likely place.

I’m guessing. Everyone’s guessing. We didn’t have a clue what the frigging grubs were or what they wanted—and maybe we still don’t. How much can they expect me to work out about glowies?

Nobody gave him a hard time about it. Cole was standing in KR-239’s crew bay talking to Mitchell, occasionally patting his shoulder. They hadn’t lost a Raven for some time, and the fate of KR-33 seemed to have shaken all the crews as the news rippled around the comms net.

Dom bent his head, straining to listen to the voice traffic as he waited to board the Raven. The alert siren was still wailing at an ear-bleeding volume.

“Okay, they’re pretty sure they’ve killed all the polyps,” he said. “No sign of the leviathan. Shit, are these things going to hitch a ride on everything? Are they parasites or something?”

“No idea. Where’s Marcus?”

“Over there.” The siren stopped and Dom rolled his head in exasperation. “Thank fuck that’s stopped. Oh, and don’t ask.”

“Why?” Baird turned around. Marcus and Hoffman were almost nose to nose, having a heated but low-volume exchange about something. “Okay. I get it.”

Baird could guess. He knew the history between those two. It was just a case of working out which of them was telling the other that he couldn’t race off and save a woman just because he felt like it. Suddenly they turned away from each other and jogged in different directions, Hoffman heading for the dock and Marcus running to the Raven.

“I’m getting the picture now.” Baird climbed into the crew bay and strapped himself in. He had to come up with some answers. He was starting to doubt himself for the first time. “The glowie grubs. The mutating exploding Brumak. Now the glowie leviathan. What’s the common thread?”

Cole broke off his conversation with Mitchell and gave Baird his mildly disapproving look. “Baby, I gave up biology class when I was in short pants. Too many dead things floatin’ in jars.”

“It’s mutagenic.”

“That don’t sound healthy.”

“Remember the luminous snot in the tunnels?”

“Yeah, one of my treasured memories.”

“I bet it’s an infection.”

“So what was that glowie shit flyin’ around on its own? See, flyin’ snot don’t sound like infection to me. Sounds like a thing.”

Cole might have quit biology class, but there was nothing wrong with his powers of observation or logic. Baird couldn’t answer that one. Yes, the luminous stuff had evaporated from dead Lambent grubs like some kind of vapor and then shot off at speed.

Air currents. That’s all. Just because something moves, it doesn’t mean it decides where it’s going.

Marcus put one boot on the sill of the bay. “Let’s go sink that thing now before we lose it. Hoffman’s scrambling the standby squads. That includes Ollivar’s men.”

“If I was Gorasni, I wouldn’t turn my back on them,” Baird said.

Marcus shrugged. “Take a look. Side by side.”

“All pals together.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

The alert siren started wailing again. Dom shut his eyes. “Shit, somebody turn that thing off.”

“That’s a new alert.” Mitchell fiddled with his headset. “Stand by.”

Marcus was getting agitated. The signs were subliminal compared to a regular guy’s, but Baird had learned to spot them. Instead of getting more restless, he seemed to shut down all nonessential movement and even erase any expression. It was as if he was making a conscious effort to lock down and not let anyone else see he was running out of patience.

Yeah, he’s worried about Anya. You’re not fooling anyone, Marcus …

“Control to all call signs.” Mathieson had become the Voice of It’s-All-Going-To-Be-Okay since Anya had moved on to infantry duty. He’d really got that tone down pat: calm, even reassuring, but with just enough steel to make it clear that shit was on an intercept course with the fan, and that he was telling everyone the holy truth. It was quite an art. “Message relayed from one of Ollivar’s units—leviathan spotted heading south about two klicks off the western coast. All call signs, stand to.”

Delta’s stand-to position—the place they were supposed to go if an attack started—was at the vehicle compound, ready to mount up and deploy by ’Dill to wherever the stalks first made landfall. Now they were dealing with a thing that was cruising around the coast and would lob its polyps ashore. The whole plan had gone down the pan in minutes.

“Hang on, do they still want us in Pelruan, or has that been scrubbed?” Dom asked. “Control, this is Santiago—what are we tasked to do now?”

“Normal stand-to position,” Mathieson said. “Pelruan’s clear. The leviathan’s coming this way. KR units, get airborne and stand by. Rig drivers—get started.”

“That leviathan must be turbocharged.” Baird did a quick calculation in his head as he jogged after Marcus. “Maybe it could swim the length of the island in hours, but we’re talking maybe thirty or forty minutes here. Not possible.”

“They glow, too,” Dom said. “They’re not normal, Baird.”

“Why does no asshole listen to me?”

He thought Marcus was out of earshot, finger pressed to his ear as he talked on the radio. But he stopped and turned.

“Baird, where do you think this thing is going to front up?”

At least Marcus knows who’s got the functioning brain in the squad.

“If it does what it did at Pelruan, it’ll come into the harbor,” Baird said, feeling a little useless now. He hated not having real answers. “No idea why. Maybe it’s trying to shed the polyps. Or maybe they’ll hitch a ride on anything until it happens to get close to dry land. I can’t tell.”

“Good enough,” Marcus said. “Control—you getting this? They’ll probably come ashore over the walls and the jetties.”

Hoffman’s voice cut in. “All call signs—remember we want to channel these things, Gears. If there’s more than we can kill outright, then we channel them to the pits. You let them through. However hard you want to stop them—you let them through. We trap them and we kill them. Keep your nerve.”

“Where’s the other one?” Baird said. “That thing can’t do a hundred and fifty klicks an hour. There’s two. There’s got to be two.”

Marcus was jogging ahead of Baird. All Baird could see was his back, but he definitely reacted to that, as if he either realized and didn’t want to be reminded, or hadn’t thought through the timings. He didn’t respond for a couple of seconds.

“If it’s got a buddy,” Marcus said, “there’s fuck-all we can do about it right now.”

Cole headed Baird off like a sheepdog. “Baby, don’t remind him that Anya’s in the shit, okay?”

“Hey, we’re all in the shit. You think this plan of Hoffman’s is going to work?”

“Gonna work about as well as taking potshots at ’em one by one until we run out of ammo.”

“Who’s going to be the lure, then? Us.”

“That’s the way it is.”

“And where’s Hoffman when all this is going down?”

“Right behind you, Corporal.” Hoffman’s bark made Baird nearly crap himself. And it wasn’t over the radio.

Baird turned to see Hoffman jogging a few strides behind him, Lancer clutched to his chest, looking homicidal. Baird regarded all officers as parasites, moved rung by rung up the promotional ladder until they couldn’t do any more hands-on damage, but Hoffman was a different animal. It was written all over him: he’d joined the army to fight, nothing more, and the whole officer thing had just ambushed him. He stuck with it because it was his duty. He’d keep on doing it until it killed him. He was Chief of Defense Staff by default because everyone else above him was dead, and rank meant less than nothing these days.

“Beats a desk job,” Baird said.

“Any day,” Hoffman grunted.

Baird took up position on the long quay that ran almost half the width of the base. Ahead of him, the navy’s last remaining Raven’s Nest carriers stretched along the deep-water jetty like a bridge. Two destroyers, Fenmont and Vale of Dane, had shifted position and were now sitting with guns aimed west.

Hoffman paced up and down behind the line of Gears, talking to someone on the radio—Michaelson, Baird assumed, judging by what he could hear.

“Then you’ll just have to make sure you drive them away from the goddamn ships, won’t you?” Hoffman sounded more weary than angry for once. “We can’t predict which way these bastards are going to run. We’ll all have to force them.”

Everything suddenly went quiet. Baird never liked this lull. His gut shriveled into a hard ball and a burning cold sensation spread through his thigh muscles. It would pass, but he was sure he really was going to piss himself one day just like Cole told everyone he did.

Then the shout went up. Somewhere on the walls above, a lookout yelled: “Contact—one-six-zero, range five hundred meters, too close for the cannon—it’s coming around the cliff.”

Baird saw the flash from Fenmont’s guns even before he heard the boom. He didn’t see the leviathan until it reared up again and dived down below the surface. Only parts of it were visible, a couple of undulating humps trailing foam, a tentacle or two as it rolled, even a glimpse of its head, but one thing was clear—it was even bigger than he’d thought, and he’d thought pretty big. Vale of Dane put on a spurt and raked the water with her 30 mm close-in defensive gun. For a few moments nothing broke the surface.

Too good to be true. Can’t be.

And it wasn’t. There was a deep metallic thud followed by a slow grinding sound, and Baird couldn’t even tell where it was coming from until Fenmont’s bow lifted meters out of the water. She hung there for a second before crashing back down with a groaning, tearing noise. The ship listed to port just as the leviathan surged out of the sea and smashed down onto the deck.

“Don’t think a chainsaw’s going to work this time,” Marcus said. “Let’s pick on something smaller.”

The leviathan turned toward the quay and plunged under the surface. There were only two options now; to stand and fight, or turn and run. Baird found he couldn’t move. The creature rose out of the water right in front of him to fill his field of vision, so close that he couldn’t even see the tentacles at its sides. And it stank like the tide had gone out. He heard the wet slaps and frantic scrabbling of polyps, and then the firing started.

It’s going to crush me. That asshole’s going to flop down on top of me and leave a greasy smear.

Baird opened fire. He didn’t know or care if it was going to work. He just fired. The leviathan veered sideways and dived again, oblivious of him.

Now the polyps were all over the jetty, scores of them—no, hundreds. Any plan to drive them toward the newly dug trenches around the base went to rat shit right away. All Baird could do was just keep firing and reloading to hold them off him. He could hear sporadic explosions and screams around him as some polyps reached their targets and detonated. The only thing that stopped him from sinking all his clips into the things was Marcus grabbing him by the arm and shoving him into a run. He tripped over the remains of a Gear, and for a moment he thought it was Cole.

“Run—just frigging run!” Marcus yelled. “Get down that trench and just run.”

Once Baird started running, his body took over and it wasn’t going to stop for anything—not even if he wanted it to. Where the hell was Cole? The leviathan must have come up again with a second wave of polyps, because the firing on the jetty started again. Baird didn’t even dare slow down to look over his shoulder. He could hear the things scuttling behind him as he sprinted after the Gears running ahead. Then he was suddenly aware that he was splashing through a stream of fluid that was getting deeper by the stride. The pungent solvent smell of imulsion made him clamp his lips together to keep the fumes out.

Oh fuck. That’s my great idea. The fuel flood. Oh shit …

It was designed to pump out a controlled spray so the polyps roasted instantly, but nobody was supposed to be running inside the trench. That was planning for you. Plans went belly-up every time. Baird prayed that nobody decided to let off a few bursts until everyone was out of the trench. He didn’t want to end his days as a barbecue. In fact, he didn’t want to die at all, ever.

Despite himself, he turned and took a few strides sideways, just long enough to see a tidal wave of dark gray legs thrashing after him. It was the first time he’d realized Marcus was right behind him.

“Yeah, you seen ’em,” Marcus panted. “Pretty. Now get the hell out.”

The trench was a couple of meters deep. Baird had no idea where he’d get a foothold and how he’d get up the sides without the polyps grabbing him. But it was that or let the plan fall apart.

Shit. This has to end.

The trench curved around. He had no idea where he was now, but he needed to get out. Then he saw Cole, hands on knees, catching his breath.

“Thought you was never comin’,” Cole said, and shoved him up the side of the trench in one smooth movement as if he’d rehearsed it to the second.

Baird pulled himself over the edge and reached down without thinking to pull Cole up. But the arm he grabbed was Marcus’s. Cole had scrambled out on his own. There was a rapid burst of fire, and then the loud whoomp of igniting vapor. Baird felt the heat sear his face. His eyebrows sizzled, singed by the fire.

And his pants and boots were soaked in fuel. He held his breath, waiting to go up like a torch.

I’m going to die. Oh shit.

“Move it,” Marcus said. “Before Dizzy runs you down.”

The world started to fall back into place. Baird knew now where he’d come up out of the trench. He was right outside the Gorasni camp. He sat up, looking into a burning pit of thrashing, twitching, exploding polyps. Where the hell had they all come from? There seemed to be hundreds more now. A grinding noise way too close to his ear made him scramble to his feet, and he narrowly missed the mine-clearing scoop of a grindlift derrick.

“Corporal, you better shift your jaywalkin’ ass,” Dizzy yelled from the cab. “I got crabs to clear.”

Baird stood back to reload and shift ammo clips into the right pockets, taking stock of the bizarre battle around him. The polyps weren’t all charging blindly down the trenches. Dizzy and the other drivers were bulldozing some of the more adventurous ones over the side in drifts, shoveling them on top of their buddies. The things kept detonating, but the rigs could withstand mines. Dizzy whooped loudly every time one went off. The pits of burning imulsion crackled and spat.

“Worked better than I expected,” Marcus said.

Baird felt for his eyebrows. “Mostly. Where’s Dom?”

“Gone with Hoffman. Come on, the leviathan’s shaking off more polyps.”

“Shit. We’ve shown our hand now. They’re not stupid—even a frigging amoeba understands that running into flames is a bad idea.”

“We’ll just have to be smarter than a fucking amoeba, then, won’t we?”

Baird took a shortcut through the Gorasni camp with Marcus and Cole, expecting to see the Gorasni settling the score with the polyps for the loss of their imulsion platform. But the men defending the camp were mostly Stranded, Ollivar’s army of scruffy assholes. They were great shots, he had to give them that. They were picking off the polyps like rabbits. If he’d been them, he’d have let the Gorasni fry.

Maybe they wanted to save each other so that they still had a sworn enemy left to vent their shit on when this was all over.

It really is going to be over. Isn’t it? Another fifteen years of this—no frigging way.

“Tell me there ain’t people here,” Cole said. He aimed short bursts into the approaching wave of polyps. Everyone was lined up across the main drag through the camp, trying to form a semicircle to stop the things dispersing. There was a whisker between pulling that off successfully and getting in someone else’s arc of fire. “’Cause tents ain’t brick walls.”

One of the Stranded opened up with a Hammerburst. They were sporting a lot of salvaged Locust weapons. “The noncoms shot through when the siren sounded,” he said. “Don’t worry, you can’t wipe out those Gorasni bastards—we’ve tried.”

“I just love it when we all get on so well,” Baird said.

“Hey, COG—these things are getting smarter by the minute. Shut up and shoot.”

The polyps seemed to be getting the idea in a dumb animal kind of way. Instead of rushing in a mass, falling over one another and presenting a nice wall of meat to target, they started to scatter, racing between the rows of tents. And that was when the tide turned the wrong way. They wheeled around and re-formed behind the line. Half the Stranded turned and formed up into an old-fashioned infantry line to face the choke point of the gate into the camp, and the others broke into pairs, conventional rifle-style.

Baird had now reached the stage where his body was on autopilot—along with his mouth—and he was too busy reacting to crap himself. It was a blessing. It would turn to fatigue and thinking every next shot would be the one he missed, the last one before something killed him. But for the time being, he was coping.

Marcus signaled Cole and Baird to block a row each. “I think they’ve played this game before,” he said.

One of the Stranded heard him. “Seen ’em a few times on land,” he called. “Still working out what else they can do. Like how they move around at sea.”

“Gee, thanks,” Baird said. “Now you frigging tell us.”

Then Baird got to see what polyps did when you didn’t drop them on the spot. One Stranded yelled, “Stoppage!” His rifle had jammed. His paired buddy was reloading. A polyp jumped him and it detonated like a grenade. It took out both men. There was a second of stunned silence before half the Stranded platoon—yeah, Baird admitted it, he had to think of them like that—went nuts, broke ranks, and charged the polyps.

You didn’t get to survive in the wild if you weren’t a tough, stubborn animal. Stranded were survivors to a man.

More polyps exploded short of their target, setting tents on fire and scattering wounding debris. Then the things started spitting something—venom, acid, whatever. Baird didn’t know, and for once his curiosity didn’t force him forward for a closer look.

The battlefield was now all smoke and yelling and an overwhelming need to kill anything that moved and wasn’t human. Baird almost didn’t hear his radio.

Just as his own name could cut through any amount of noise, so could the word Pelruan. Mathieson was trying to free up a Raven and two squads of Gears. One of the Gorasni squads answered instead.

“We go,” said the voice. It was Yanik. “You pick us up now. Tell the lovely duchess to hang on.”

Sam. It had to be. That was what the Gorasni sailors had taken to calling her, duchashka. Pelruan had more trouble, then.

“Hang on for what?” Marcus asked.

Mathieson responded. “Another leviathan. It’s hanging around Pelruan. They need some backup.”

“I fucking told you so,” Baird said to Marcus. “There’s two of these things.”

“Three,” Mathieson said. “There’s three.”

“Yes, it’s back.” Sam lowered the binoculars and handed them to Anya. “I swear it’s learned already. Look.”

Bernie divided up the ammo between the squads with Rossi. Rifles were all they had except for the guns on the garrison’s two ’Dills, and those weren’t much use against small, fast targets on the ground. She wanted to save those for the leviathan if it got within range. Right now, it was being a sensible monster and keeping its distance.

“That’s what freaks me more than anything,” Rossi said. “Grubs—you knew they could think. But these things—they’re just animals. Or plants, even, like the damn stalks. What’s driving them? What do they want? They’re not even eating us.”

Anya squatted next to Bernie. “You think we should evacuate the town?”

She should have been asking Rossi. Bernie tried to be diplomatic.

“I don’t know what Drew thinks,” she said, “but we need to stop those things coming ashore in the first place, or else it won’t matter where we run. They’ll just spread through the island. Eh, Drew?”

Rossi didn’t look up from the piles of clips. “We should at least ask the civvies if they want to leave. I guarantee they won’t, but we ought to.”

The townsfolk were watching. Only a few of them had firearms, but all those who did seemed to be standing around waiting for orders. They’d been used to taking care of themselves, and however ill prepared they were for the world of grubs and Lambent, they were still willing to have a go.

Among them were the old boys from the Duke of Tollen’s Regiment. Bernie knew she was in no position to tell them they were too old. They were in their seventies and eighties; they might not have been fit and athletic, but they still knew how to use a rifle. They probably thought the same about her.

I think they call that irony. I tell this bunch of vets that they’re no use now. I hope Vic sees the joke.

And I hope he’s alive to hear it.

“You heard who Mathieson’s sending us, didn’t you?” Anya said. “Gorasni troops.”

“Shit.” Rossi shook his head slowly. “Well, ma’am, you wanted to hone your frontline command skills. This is going do it.”

“I’ll handle it.” Bernie felt Anya had enough on her plate. Being smart and gutsy wasn’t going to be enough to get her through this alone, not even if she could suddenly sprout a dose of her mother’s killing aggression. “I get on okay with the Gorasni. It’s probably because I know how to castrate farm animals. Always builds bridges, that.”

“I can hear a Raven,” Anya said.

Mac trotted over to Bernie and stuck his nose in her face. Will Berenz had either let him out on his own, or else he’d been wandering around nearby.

“Hey, sweetie, go home. You can’t tackle polyps. Or go sit in the Packhorse.” Mac just looked at her with those sad, baffled eyes as if he was waiting for orders in a language he understood. Bernie beckoned to one of the townspeople. “Take him back and lock him up somewhere safe, will you?”

The Raven appeared as a black flickering shape approaching down the coastline. Mel Sorotki’s voice came over the radio net.

“KR-Two-Three-Nine inbound, three minutes—Mataki, just tell me you don’t have a recipe for these things.”

Anya had her intense and slightly defocused look on, as if she was running through the academy theory classes in her head. “Roger that, Two-Three-Nine. Just you?”

“Stroud, we’re a one-bird army up here. These Gorasni are hard-core.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“First wars first. Kill the current enemy before the previous ones. That’s what I hear.”

One of the Tollen vets walked over to Anya and Drew. He wasn’t fast off the mark, but he still had that upright bearing and he carried an old rifle like it was still part of him.

“Ma’am.” He didn’t salute. He came from the era when you didn’t salute or return one if you weren’t wearing your cap. “Corporal Frederic Benten. We still know how to follow orders.”

“And are you still good shots?” Anya asked.

“Yes, and we stand our ground. Partly because we’re not so good at the running-away bit these days.”

“Good.” There wasn’t a trace of condescension in Anya’s voice. “I want you to form a rank behind the Gorasni, so that if anything gets past them, you pick it off.” She gestured. “Three of you on that headland, the rest of you in front of the cottages at the top of the slope.”

“Ma’am, Gorasni?”

“If they’re prepared to get killed defending this town, they’re under my command like everyone else,” she said.

Benten took it with a grim nod. He went back to his friends, and Bernie watched the news spread among them.

“Shit,” Sam said. “Let’s hope the old discipline kicks in.”

Sorotki landed the Raven and the guy they called Yanik jumped out. He trotted up to Sam and bowed extravagantly.

“My life is yours, duchashka. Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, though.”

Sam gave him her half-smile, the one where her eyes didn’t even flicker. “I always wanted a meat shield. Is that it? Eight of you?”

“Eight Gorasni equals twenty COG equals fifty trained Stranded. We are economical people. Value for money.”

“Bullshit,” Sam said. “But thanks. And the old boys with the trident badges, the ones giving you the hairy eyeball—they hate your fucking guts. Your guys put their guys in death camps. Be tactful.”

Sam could always cut to the chase. Yanik seemed to appreciate it. Sorotki and Mitchell joined the huddle to discuss tactics.

“The leviathan’s cruising out there,” Mitchell said. “It keeps diving when we get close, but we’re up for a strafing run if you 77 are.”

“Remember those things can rear a long way out of the water.” Anya signaled to the Pelruan locals to move into position. They had no personal radios, so it was back to last-century soldiering. “Don’t take chances. Pull back and give us air support here if you don’t sink the thing.”

“It’ll provoke it into shaking off polyps, probably,” Sorotki said. “At least that gives us a chance to choose when the attack starts.”

Bernie put her hand on Anya’s shoulder to get her attention. “I’ll go with the locals, ma’am,” she said. “That way one at least of us has a radio link to you.”

“Good idea, Bernie. And I think they’ll listen to you more than me.”

It was a shame. Anya was a good Gear. She had all the right instincts, but she was a small, pretty, blond girlie who looked a lot younger than she was, and the old men clearly didn’t give a damn that she came from war-hero stock, even if they knew that her mother had won the Embry Star. The doubt was all over their faces.

“Okay, Mel, poke the beehive,” she said.

Sorotki had a tough job on his hands. Mitchell was a pretty good door gunner, but they had no idea if a stalk was going to punch out of the water if they ventured too low, or if the leviathan was going to swat them out of the air with a massive tentacle. The Raven circled over the shallows. All Bernie and the others could do was watch. Mitchell was a small silhouette in the open door. Then he opened fire, raking the water below.

The rounds raised a curtain of spray. A few seconds later, a paddle-shaped tentacle like a squid’s unfurled from the surface and missed the Raven by three meters. Sorotki banked sharply and gained height, coming back to let Mitchell piss the leviathan off more. Mitchell emptied two belts of ammo into the thing, and it did the job. It did the job really well. The next thing Bernie saw was the tentacle vanish as the Raven shot off toward the beach.

“Incoming!” Sorotki said. “One huge mad thing heading your way, on a line with the slipway.”

One of Rossi’s squad was on lookout up on the high ground on the other side of the harbor. “No, it’s passed the slipway. It’s going to hit this side.”

“Get out of there,” Rossi yelled. “Get back down here.”

Being shelled was bowel-loosening, Bernie recalled, but when the shells that landed had minds of their own and charged after you, it was a whole new level of fear. The leviathan crashed down onto the shore. Polyps poured ashore in a weird beachhead landing. Bernie still couldn’t tell where the polyps came from—from inside the leviathan, off its back, even out of its arse—but there were a lot of them. She shifted to stand behind the Gorasni positions and signaled to the Tollen vets to stand by. The firing started.

But the Gorasni boys didn’t hold a line—they advanced.

“I can’t do this,” Benten said suddenly. “I can’t stand with these men.”

He raised his rifle. He was definitely aiming at the polyps, but it was clear he wasn’t going to back up the Gorasni. The old soldiers were watching him, and they weren’t going where Bernie had directed them. For a second she had to look away from the Gears and other men in front of her.

“You’ll go where I tell you, Corporal,” she yelled. “Now.”

“We won’t fight alongside them.” Benten started backing off to the road to bypass the eight Gorasni. “I mean it. They can die. We’ll do this alone.”

It was the worst time to lose discipline. “We’ve got a bunch of Stranded defending the Gorasni camp,” Bernie yelled. “That’s after the Gorasni killed some of them and dumped their bodies in the camp. If that feud’s on hold until we stop the polyps, then so’s yours. That’s an order.”

Some of the polyps had broken through. Bernie had no choice. She grabbed Benten and shoved him bodily into line. The Gorasni had turned and were moving back now, drawing the polyps into the more confined space of the street.

“Kill those fucking things.” Bernie knew she had to make this stick. “Back up those bloody Gorasni or get out of the way. Now. Or I’ll slot you myself.”

“Then go ahead, Sergeant.”

These men were Gears like her. She could only guess what they’d been through at the hands of the enemy. She knew what vengeance and loathing felt like; for one act of violation she’d butchered two men, and done things way beyond a just execution. They’d deserved it. But she scaled that up to spending weeks, months, years in a Gorasni labor camp watching your mates worked and starved to death, and probably hoping you wouldn’t be far behind them. She had no idea how she could ask these old soldiers to forget that.

But she had to. “You’ll do it,” she said, “because you’re still a Gear.”

Benten looked at her with a mixture of real pain and absolute disgust. Bernie was sure she’d have told the Gorasni to go fuck themselves, too. But he stopped, moved back to the Gorasni line, and opened fire.

Bernie felt like shit. But, like the feuds, atonement would have to wait for later.