CHAPTER 18

“They’re still there.” Garcia never sounded irritable no matter how many times Dom asked if the leviathans were still around. “But we’re relying on the hydrophones. The side scan’s no use—it’s active sonar. Once we ping a leviathan, it knows where we are.”

Dom braced his hands on the wheelhouse console and looked out into the night. “It might know anyway. We don’t know a damn thing about them, do we?”

“They blow up.” Marcus listened to the radio conversation, frowning at something unseen on the horizon. “That’s all the zoology lesson we need.”

Falconer had suspended her own hull sonar in case she inadvertently pinged either boat and gave the leviathans a clue. But her engines and prop couldn’t be silenced. They were a potential magnet for the creatures. Dom was waiting for them to decide the patrol boat was a soft option and come after it first.

Michaelson let his binoculars dangle from his neck and took the mike out of its deckhead cradle. “Falconer to Control, stand by Hammer … Falconer to Clement, Zephyr, we’re in your hands.”

Sometimes you got a Gorasni who was fluent in Tyran, and sometimes you didn’t. “Zephyr to Falconer, we have firing solution. We fire, yes?”

Dom hung around the wheelhouse door. Cole wandered by and nudged him. “What they doin’, Dom?”

“I think they’re both going for the same one but from different angles.”

“And this is shallow, right? Like twenty meters? ’Cos we can hear ’em on the radio.”

“Zephyr here—we fire first, COG, because we are very close. Short track.”

Michaelson opened his mouth for a moment but he never got as far as a response. Dom heard a command in Gorasni, then a snatch of Garcia’s voice: “Fire one …”

Dom shoved Cole out onto the deck. “Come on, when that hits, one of them’s going to—”

“Impact.”

Dom was sure he’d lifted clear of the deck for a second. The explosion sounded like it was a couple of kilometers off the starboard bow, and if he’d been fast enough he might have caught the plume of foam even in the dark. Falconer shuddered. It had to be a kill.

“Yeah, shallow,” Cole said.

“Falconer to Zephyr, Falconer to Clement—time to thin out unless you’ve got a solution on Number Two right now.”

“Zephyr to Falconer—its friend must have heard that. Zephyr to Clement, I hear your tanks—you dive?”

Dom didn’t hear whether Clement responded. He was focused on what he was sure was going to happen next. That explosion would have rattled even a leviathan’s brain. It would either go after a sub, or surface to go after the noisiest, easiest target to find—Falconer.

Dom heard a loud splash like someone slapping the water just as he reached Marcus on the harpoon.

Marcus didn’t always manage to batten down all his reactions. Dom saw the look on his face—frown gradually vanishing, eyes widening, even a very slight drop of the jaw—and turned to see what he was staring at.

Shit, the thing was big. Even in the dark, Dom could see that. The patrol boats’s running lights reflected off its wet scales. Even without the points of bluish light, its outline was clear. Marcus fired.

The harpoon went whistling out like a rocket grenade, whipping the line behind it. Dom heard the wet thwack on impact. He expected to hear the explosive tip detonate, but there was just a faint, muffled pomp, and the leviathan spun around and slapped down onto the sea. Water washed over the deck. The line began paying out at speed.

“Baby, you caught somethin’,” Cole yelled.

“Why the hell hasn’t the thing blown up?”

“No idea,” Marcus said. “Maybe we hit it somewhere that doesn’t detonate.”

Dom grabbed the ax. “Cole Train, you stand clear of that.” He was expecting the creature to dive. If it tried to drag Falconer down, he had to sever that cable. “If that line parts, it’ll cut clean through you like a damn blade.”

“It’s holding,” Marcus called. The line went tight. “Cole, take over. Just watch the line.”

He grabbed the targeting laser and went to the bow. Dom couldn’t tell if the leviathan was dragging the boat or not, but either way it was going to be a tough job for the helmsman.

The line paid out to about eight hundred meters. Dom was pretty sure he recalled that the required safety clearance for mine-hunters was one thousand meters. It was all getting a bit too close.

From the slightly elevated bridge, Muller could see more than Dom could from the rising and falling deck.

“It’s coming about,” he said over the radio. “It’s turning to starboard. Still breaking the surface.”

“I need it closer.” Marcus aimed the laser. “Can you get me inside a hundred meters?”

Nobody seemed to want to repeat the obvious. If Marcus held the laser on it long enough, if Baird could align the Hammer, if the leviathan stayed surfaced for those essential seconds—then if it detonated like the Brumak beneath Jacinto had, Falconer was going to be an instant shower of rusty shrapnel.

But the Brumak was underground. Directed blast and all that shit. Yeah. This blast’s not confined.

No, Dom knew zip about explosives on that kind of scale, and he was going to die. At best, Falconer was going to be lifted clear by the shock wave and smashed down hard again, hard enough to break her back.

Life rafts. Okay, don’t forget. Rafts.

Falconer picked up speed. For a moment, it felt as if they were closing the gap on the leviathan too fast. Dom clung to the rail and tried to look ahead. He was sure he could see the steady, undulating movement as the thing rippled along near the surface with its back breaking the water. He definitely felt Falconer steering hard to starboard. When he looked back for a moment and the lights caught the water, he could see a U-shaped wake. The boat had turned back toward Vectes.

“I’d take a guess that it’s trying to beach,” Muller said.

“Baird? Are you ready?” Marcus kept changing position, trying to steady his aim. “You got a lock yet?”

The radio crackled. It took a couple of seconds for Baird to respond.

“Okay, the sats have picked up the targeting laser. Can you ask the glowie to slow down?”

“Helm, give us some slack in that line,” Marcus said. “Close the gap. Cole—wind the line back on the winch.”

“How much?”

“Until the line goes taut. Then Muller can cut his speed and slow the thing.”

“That’s going to mean it’ll blow frigging close to us,” Muller said. “I mean sinking close.”

Michaelson cut in. “Do it, helm.”

The engines roared and the line started to sag. When it draped over the bow rail, Marcus yelled “Now!” and Cole hit the winch control. The line wound back around the capstan and went taut. Dom felt the shudder.

“Never done this on a moving surface,” Marcus said. “Shit.”

“You ready?” Baird asked. “Because correcting this thing manually is a bitch.”

“Yeah, let’s swap places.”

“Come on.”

Marcus just grunted. Dom could see the targeting beam hitting a scaly back, but it was bouncing and drifting all over the place.

“I’m ready,” Baird said. “I mean, really ready.”

“I get it, Baird.”

Dom could see the naval base clearly now, its jetties and ships picked out by safety lights. At forty klicks per hour, that six-kilometer distance would be eaten up in minutes. They were getting too close to the island. The leviathan plowed on. Dom heard the engines throttle down and the harpoon line creaked alarmingly.

Nobody really knew what a leviathan could do, let alone a Lambent one. It might just have been holding back before showing them just how puny the boat was by comparison. Falconer slowed right down, then her engines roared again and it felt like she was turning.

“Fuck,” Muller said. “That’s full astern. It’s got us. We’re going to burn out a motor at this rate.”

Dom really was ready to part that line. He hefted the ax and positioned himself clear of the arc that the line would whip through when he cut it. Falconer seemed not to be making way at all. Then there was a collective shout—the lookouts, Marcus, Michaelson standing at the bridge door—and the leviathan disappeared. The line plunged down into the sea.

“Shit. Lost the contact.” Marcus still held the laser on the point where he’d last seen the leviathan, but the beam didn’t penetrate far through water, especially water with a lot of deflecting debris in it. “Can we winch that thing up?”

Cole stared at the creaking capstan. “That oversized eel’s doin’ the winchin’, not us.”

“In case you’ve forgotten me, I’m still pretty ready.” Baird sounded irked. “Just give me a call when you’re through pissing around.”

“Cole, jerk its chain,” Marcus said.

The winch whined. Dom waited for the creaking to turn into snaps and pings as the line started to part. He was so fixed on the deck hazards that he found himself forgetting that they were tormenting a life-form that broke destroyers and might even blow up of its own accord.

Shit. What if it lets some polyps loose? Can they climb ropes?

He needn’t have worried about the polyps. That was the least of their problems. The winch started to smoke, the line groaned, and Falconer lurched.

“Okay,” Muller said. “Everyone think happy thoughts. Because—oh fuck. It’s on the move.”

“Okay, follow,” Marcus said.

“It’s on a course for the base. I’m thinking suicide run here.”

“Follow it,” Marcus said, “but get ready to do a handbrake turn when I say.”

“Hey, Land-crab, the navy doesn’t do handbrakes.”

“Fine.” Marcus sounded strained. “Just find some way of dragging that asshole west of the base at the last minute.”

Dom decided the ax wasn’t going to help much now. Falconer picked up speed again. The leviathan was on a collision course with the carrier berth, and Falconer was along for the ride whether she wanted to be or not.

Yeah, Marcus was right again.

Baird wasn’t good just with big oily hardware; he was pretty good with computers, too. He wondered if even Anya could have handled this kind of target on the fly with a satellite network that was failing one satellite at a time. It was going to be all too easy to steam the water either side of the leviathan and not cook it medium-rare.

Mathieson was watching him intently. He could feel the lieutenant’s eyes drilling a hole in him. Baird had to keep resetting the sats’ reference times manually because one of them drifted out of sync every so often. The more sats he could bring to bear, the more accurate the firing; and with a target that didn’t move in a predictable line like a surface ship, that was going to be tough.

Oh, and then there was the whole diving thing. That was really starting to piss Baird off.

“Baird to Falconer—try to keep that asshole on the surface, will you? The sats’ laser can’t cope.”

Michaelson sounded strained but still did the gentleman-pirate act. “Falconer to Baird, we strive to please. Sergeant Fenix assures me he has your welfare at heart. Stand by.”

And he’s going to think I’m an asshole if I don’t get this right. Just watch Cole’s back. Leave the psycho whale to me.

It was a kilometer out now, its speed about twenty kph. They must have been burning out some of Falconer’s motors trying to put the brakes on that. Baird decided he’d have a lot of repairs to look forward to when this was over. Hoffman came thundering up the stairs again and loomed over him.

“If you can’t stop that thing,” he said, “we’re going to have to burn a hundred thousand liters of fuel cleaning up its polyps.”

“Yeah, I get it, Colonel,” Baird said irritably, not looking away from the display. “I do.”

“Falconer’s picked up speed again, sir.” Mathieson’s attention was back on the radar sweep. “She’s maneuvering parallel with it and pulling ahead.”

Hoffman picked up the mike. “Hoffman to Falconer. What are you doing?”

“Falconer to Hoffman—if we can’t hold it still, we can try to steer it away from the berths.”

Baird struggled to keep synchronizing the satellite feeds.

“Five hundred meters,” Mathieson said. “Falconer’s steering wide. It’s going to make landfall to the west of us, sir.”

“Baird, smoke that thing,” Hoffman said. “Even if you haven’t got a lock. Now.”

“Okay, okay. Primed for a six-second burn, maximum setting. That should distract it if nothing else.”

It didn’t take much fluctuation to throw a Hammer laser off target when it was dependent on a beam from low orbit finding another one from a handheld gun bouncing along in a ship. This was precision stuff. Baird hit the control and watched the numbers cascade down his display. Then he spun around in his seat to look out the window. It was out of his hands now. The Hammer was locked on. He waited for the spectacular white-hot beams to light up the night sky.

And boy, was it impressive.

It was like a slow-motion moment in the middle of a thunderstorm. Unnaturally straight lines of lightning converged on a point beyond the walls.

Baird got up and took four strides to the window, dumb as that was. But he had to see. Hoffman caught his arm. Maybe he had a better idea of what was going to happen; the old bastard had helped grill the whole planet with the Hammer, after all. The next thing Baird knew, Michaelson was yelling “Brace, brace, brace!” over the radio and a ball of light blinded him. He put his arms up instinctively to shield his eyes. The sound came a second later.

Baird didn’t hear it; he felt it. It was off the scale. He felt like someone had split his head open with a hammer. Then the window shattered and his hands and scalp stung with cold needles.

For a few moments, he wasn’t sure where he was. But he was alive. He knew that because he could taste the blood in his mouth.

Fuck. I think that worked.

“Mathieson? You okay, son?” That was Hoffman’s voice, filtered through the cotton wool of Baird’s numbed ears. “Shit, what a mess.”

“Still got power to the system, sir. I’m fine. Better take a look at Baird—he was right in front of the window.”

Baird focused on the light above him, but it wasn’t the room’s lighting. The bulbs had blown out along with the windowpanes. He was looking at the glow from a fire.

The radio net went crazy as damage reports flooded in.

“It’s beached. Sir, it’s beached. Landslide! Shit, run!”

“Polyps ashore! Polyps!”

Baird could hear rumbling like an avalanche gathering speed. Then the naval base alarm drowned it out. He hauled himself upright on the nearest desk, skidding on shards of glass and papers. Hoffman pushed him out the door.

By the time the fresh air hit him, his adrenaline was the only thing keeping him moving. Gears sprinted for the west wall of the base. He reached for the Gnasher shotgun slung on his back and went forward automatically toward the sound of Lancer fire.

“Where’s the wall?” he asked. He was staring at open sea. Little clusters of wobbling white light scuttled from the horizon toward him. “There was a wall there.”

“Shit,” Hoffman said. “It took the cliff out. It took the goddamn cliff out, Corporal.”

“Hey, don’t dock my wages. I just killed a frigging whale-sized glowie. There’s bound to be some cleanup.”

At night, the scale of the damage didn’t really sink in. Baird couldn’t see enough to be shocked by the instant change in the landscape. He could see the polyps charging at him, though, and that was a lot more urgent. He aimed at the bioluminescence and found he could hit them better with the Gnasher, especially if he let them get dangerously close. They splattered his boots. He started to feel personal scores had been settled every time one of the ugly little assholes burst in front of him.

Most of the Ravens seemed to be airborne, playing their searchlights on the parts of the base where the fixed lighting had failed. Baird ran out of polyps and turned around to find Hoffman had gone.

“Hey, Colonel, you taking a break or something?”

He looked around. There was sporadic gunfire everywhere, but he couldn’t see any more glowies. Shit, where’s Hoffman? And what’s happened to Falconer? Baird started backing away, reloading his Gnasher. He tried the radio.

“Baird to Falconer, tell me you didn’t sink.”

It took a while for Marcus to answer. “Nice. Destructive, but nice.”

Baird fought down a dumb surge of pride. Hey, I’m not after his approval, am I? Get a grip. “Still got polyps.”

“Baby, you need some ointment for that,” Cole said.

“How many?” Marcus asked.

“Couple of hundred got ashore.”

“And?”

“I think we got them all.” Cole was okay, so Baird could get back to worrying about his own ass again without feeling bad about it. “Got to find Hoffman. I’m standing here on my own like everyone else knows where the party is except me.”

Baird had been caught too close to too many explosions. He knew they were taking their toll. But as usual, he felt almost back to normal again all too fast, a weird kind of peacefulness that he knew was something connected to the shock. It was almost like having a local anesthetic and watching Doc Hayman slice you up; you could see the damage was being done, but it was all a long way away for the time being.

He moved forward past the barracks block, expecting to hear Falconer or even Mathieson on the radio saying that there was now a whole pod of pissed-off leviathans steaming toward the base. But all he could hear was the crackling of a fire. Yellow light flickered on a wall. One of the polyps must have detonated near something flammable.

Hey, I got the thing before it spewed even more of them. I didn’t fail.

It wasn’t until Baird turned the next corner that he felt the heat on his face and stopped in his tracks. He was used to stumbling into firefights and seeing some weird and desperate shit, but it took him a few moments to work out what was really going on here.

It looked like a camp bonfire. A moving carpet of embers sizzled, wheezed, and popped. From time to time something exploded like an aerosol can. Gears, Stranded, and Gorasni stood around it, most of them holding their weapons in the safety position or even slung over their shoulders. Three of them were hosing the pile with flamethrowers.

Hoffman held out his hand to one of the Gorasni and the guy passed him his flamethrower. The colonel stood in grim silence and laid down a stream of flame like it was some kind of ritual. Baird wanted to back away quietly and hope nobody had seen him.

The bonfire was actually a heap of dead and dying polyps. There hadn’t been that many disgorged this time, but this response to them was the kind of overkill Baird had seen when Locust stragglers had caught up with the population escaping Jacinto. There hadn’t been many grubs left, but every Gear and every unit charged in to slice them up, desperate to put the boot in one last time after so many years of taking shit from the things.

Baird had joined in then, too. A Stranded guy turned down his flamethrower’s jet and stepped back to pass it to him.

“Be my guest,” the man said. “You might not get the chance next time.”

It was pointless, but Baird did it anyway, if only for the experience of opening up that jet and seeing how far he could shoot it. He wasn’t sure if the ritual purged anything in him or not.

The naval base siren came to life moments later and sounded the all-clear. Hoffman walked up to Baird and slapped him on the back. He had that look that said his mind was on something even worse than a collapsing naval base and a whole new kind of enemy.

“You’re a bastard, Baird,” he said. “But you’re our bastard.”

It was one of the nicest compliments Baird could remember getting. He didn’t get many.

“Somebody fetch the COG boys a broom,” one of the Stranded guys yelled. “They’re going to be sweeping this place clean for a year, if they live that long. So long, assholes.”

They were all walking away. The Gorasni stood and watched them sullenly; maybe they thought the all-clear meant it was time to start the feuding again.

“You leaving?” Baird said. “And we had so much to talk about.”

“Yeah, this is the last place we want to be.” The guy had a handheld radio, the kind that civilian security guards used to use in the days before the world went to shit. “You’re finished, COG. We’re getting clear of you while we still can.”

He walked away, talking to someone on the radio. Baird heard him say something about 1800, sunset tomorrow, and to get everyone together for the fleet.

They were leaving, then. That was something. Baird thought that was worth changing the map of the island to achieve.

He’d check what that actually looked like in the morning.

One day, he’d be dead, and then all this crap would be over. That was something to look forward to, Hoffman decided.

He leaned out of the Raven’s crew bay and surveyed the changed landscape as best a man could when he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was looking at. The granite cliffs that formed the western limit of the naval base had fallen into the sea, exposing tunnels like a broken beehive and leaving walls trying to bridge thin air.

And the ancient cannons were gone. They lay somewhere below in the pounding waves. Hoffman thought of Anvegad for a moment and wondered if the Anvil Gate gun battery was still in one piece. He suspected it was.

But here, he’d lost a third of the base. At least most of the ships—were still afloat on the eastern side.

If we ever need to run again—can we?

One of the Raven’s Nest carriers, Dalyell, looked as dead as the former Chairman she had been named for. She was listing to one side and down at the bows. Hoffman watched the activity on her decks as teams of Gears and seamen tried to repair her, an emergency pump at her stern spewing water over the side.

It was the hectares of tents and wooden huts that made him privately despair, though. Where there had been a growing city, temporary accommodation gradually turning into solid, permanent buildings a road at a time, the ground now looked like the aftermath of a Hammer strike.

I’ve seen this all before. I don’t think I can stomach seeing this again. And again …

The road layout was still visible, a neat grid spreading out from the walls of the naval base into what had been open countryside and fields when they’d landed here. Nearly half the new homes had gone. Where there had been roofs, there were now piles of charred wood and ash.

But the people survived this time. This isn’t Ephyra. You can always rebuild the bricks and mortar.

“Shit, sir.” Mitchell stared down from the crew bay with him. “How much more of this can they take?”

Hoffman was trained to say uplifting things and crack down hard on the easily daunted. Morale mattered. It wasn’t an illusion. Losing the will to go on was the difference between life and death in extreme crisis. But he just couldn’t spout the required lines any longer because he didn’t believe them himself.

Admiralty House was a wreck. It hadn’t burned, but the roof and windows had been blown out. Paper was still drifting everywhere on the wind. And still people got on with the task at hand. It should have made Hoffman proud to see orderly lines of Gears and civilians moving equipment and supplies out of the main building to safe cover. Instead, it just broke his heart.

He reminded himself that he was entitled to just five minutes of negativity and despair per conflict, and then he had get back out there and do the job. He had to be seen to be holding it all together.

“Got to walk the course,” he said. “Set me down there, Sorotki.”

“What happened to the kid and his dad?” Mitchell asked. “You know. The bombers.”

There was nothing like a brand-new monster to take your mind off the old ones. “Last time I checked,” Hoffman said, “they were in the detention block.”

“Only reason for asking, sir, is that the detention block’s now forming a rather decorative breakwater down there.”

Hoffman had another torn moment like so many; a burst of serves you right, you bastards, followed almost immediately by imagining what it was like to be locked in a cell and unable to escape as disaster struck. Is that concern for those assholes? He had his doubts. He suspected he was simply reliving his guilt and bewilderment that he had once left Marcus to the grubs as they overran the prison in Ephyra.

“Better check,” Hoffman said. “But it’s not a priority.”

It was, of course. He wanted as many seeds of future guilt swept out of the way as he could. But it wasn’t Mitchell’s job to do that. He jumped down from the Raven and made his way from the main gate, through the barracks blocks, and out onto the parade ground. Deep fissures had opened up in the concrete. He expected the paving to subside under him at any moment.

New Jacinto had escaped the fate of the old city, though. It got an earthquake-sized shock, but it hadn’t sunk.

Lucky. Or maybe fate’s keeping us around to punish us.

No; lucky, definitely lucky. He had to think that. And thinking it made it so, because a man could choose to feel joy or misery by selecting the things he compared his plight with. It was all relative—pain, hunger, loneliness, joy. The trick was finding the comparator. By the time he got halfway across the open square, he was in a bullish mood again and ready to start over.

I survive. We all survive. And those who don’t are out of it anyway, free, oblivious. Margaret, Samuel Byrne, every Gear I lost, every Kashkuri who died in Anvegad—and everyone on this planet who died when I turned that command key to launch the Hammer of Dawn.

Hoffman had never discussed that night with Prescott. It was the kind of soul-searching intimacy and admission of ghosts that you could manage only with the people you trusted, sometimes not even with the ones you loved. But at that moment he was in the right frame of mind to ask Prescott questions that had nothing to do with trusting the man.

The Chairman should have been back by now. Half the civilians had come back to New Jacinto even if their homes had gone. Hoffman was surprised by how easy they found it to move, but then they still had very few possessions that couldn’t be bundled into a bag. It was the administration that was now weighed down by its attachment to material things.

“Is this damn building structurally sound, Lennard?”

Hoffman stood outside the main entrance to Admiralty House and looked up at the frontage. Staff Sergeant Parry was wearing a helmet, which was unusual for him.

“Can’t guarantee it, Colonel,” Parry said. “But I’ve been up to the top floor and I’m still in one piece, so if you need to go in, feel free. I shut off the power, though. The radio net’s been transferred back to the emergency management response truck. I told the Chairman to mind where he steps.”

“He’s back, then?” Asshole. Never told me. “Up top?”

“Sifting through his office.”

Fine. Let’s lance that boil, shall we?

“I’ll go up and see him.” Hoffman found himself rehearsing his excuses for breaking into the desk, and despising himself at the same time for even feeling a need to. “Sitrep meeting at eighteen hundred today with Sharle and his team, in—hell, where’s a safe, dry place to meet now?”

“I’ll radio you when I find somewhere, sir. But we’ll have a better picture of the habitability of the site by then. We’ve got water and generators, we’ve got food, the field latrines are intact, and the weather’s good. All in all, it beats having grubs smashing through the sewers and water mains all the time.”

Hoffman was going to make sure that Parry got a medal. Sappers had kept Old Jacinto running for all those impossible, terrible years, and now they were doing the same for the new city. Their never-ending job was slightly easier here. Parry had chosen to be a satisfied man, if not a happy one, living proof of Hoffman’s theory.

But was Prescott going to be happy? It was time to find out. Hoffman climbed the stairs slowly, crunching on broken glass in the stairwell, partly out of caution and partly to give Prescott warning that he had company. When he got to the top floor, he could feel the breeze coming through the old sail loft. The roof had been ripped up.

Prescott was rolling charts and stacking them carefully in a cardboard box. His two close protection Gears, Rivera and Lowe, stood at the broken windows watching the cleanup. Hoffman wondered what Prescott felt he needed protection from at that moment, other than falling plasterboard.

“Victor.” Prescott looked up, just a little too slowly to be natural. “So we lick our wounds and return to the fray. It could have been much worse.”

“That’s the spirit, sir.” Anything less than a growl was sarcasm, and most people knew that about him by now. “Keep calm and carry on.”

“Corporal, would you and Lowe excuse us for a few minutes?” Prescott knew Hoffman’s tone only too well. “Take a meal break while things are quiet.”

Hoffman waited for the two Gears’ footsteps to fade on the stairs.

“That sounds as if you’re expecting trouble,” he said. “People are pretty shaken up, but they haven’t started lynching COG officials yet.”

Prescott was still a model of leisurely calm. “We stand at a difficult crossroads. There’ll be many questioning my judgment and fitness to lead, for bringing them all this way to face more hardship.”

“Is there something you want to share with me, Chairman?”

“Are you one of them, Victor?”

Okay, let’s get down to it. “I’m the one who thought we’d be better off on an island in a more temperate climate. Not you.”

“Ah, still taking sole responsibility for our joint decisions. Do you want to be a martyr, Colonel? Or a politician?”

“Cut the bullshit.”

“I get a very strong feeling that you no longer have confidence in me.”

Hoffman folded his arms. He had no idea why he made sure his hand was tucked loosely under his left elbow so that he could draw his sidearm instantly, but it was. Prescott had a pistol. Hoffman had never known him even to look as if he might use it under any circumstances. But now wasn’t the time to test that impression.

“I wish it was an easy yes or no,” Hoffman said. “There’s not one major decision you’ve made that I would have done differently. I never saw you do anything dumb. I’ve never known you to even get drunk or screw a woman. But you’re a liar, Chairman, and that makes my job too hard. There’s no possible reason left for keeping information from your defense staff.”

Prescott was still salvaging the contents of his office. He didn’t even seem to be doing it as distraction. He walked around to his chair and rattled the desk drawer.

“This is really rather juvenile, Victor. You feel slighted because I didn’t tell you every detail?”

“Like the existence of classified research facilities, like New Hope? That kind of shit isn’t detail. It’s what I need to know.”

“The army is the servant of the state. It’s not the government, and that’s who decides what needs to be known.”

“True. But you’re still a goddamn liar.”

“So why did you do it, Victor?”

Prescott could have been fishing for information himself, of course. He had a talent for that. He homed in on faint guilt like a shark following a molecule of blood in the water. Hoffman didn’t care what Prescott found out now, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of being played again.

“Mistrust corrodes,” Hoffman said. “Rots the whole working relationship. And this isn’t any old job—it’s about you and me keeping the human race from extinction.” What the hell. Say it. What can he do to you? What’s left to break? “I want to think that it’s just some compromising pictures of you and a sheep. Just sleaze. Dumb, petty shit. I really do.”

But Prescott wasn’t sleazy or greedy or conventionally corrupt. Hoffman knew it, and for a moment that almost made him cave in. Prescott’s motive was just salvation. It wasn’t malice.

No. This shit stops right here. His motive doesn’t make any difference to the consequences. I need to know. I need to know all the things he still won’t tell me.

Hidden things, buried things, encrypted things, things lurking under the surface waiting to drag him down—grubs, monsters, secrets, it didn’t matter which. Hoffman had had a gutful of them all. He wanted everything out in the open. He wanted to shine the light in its face and see it for what it really was.

Prescott’s expression didn’t change. Hoffman wanted a fight, an air-clearing showdown. He wasn’t going to get one. He knew it. The Chairman tried the key in the lock, jiggled it around, and eventually got the drawer open. He looked inside but didn’t actually touch the data disk.

“You didn’t really intend to cover your tracks,” Prescott said. The wind whipped through the gap in the roof and scattered odd papers around. “That’s far too sly for you. But seeing as you want to be told things—whatever information you have is also stored somewhere else.”

“Very wise precaution.”

“So what have you done with the disk?”

“Kiss my ass, Chairman. I’ll tell you when you tell me.”

“So you haven’t managed to break the encryption.”

You crafty asshole. I walked right into that. Shit, I must be getting senile.

Prescott could have done plenty to Hoffman right then. He would have been within his rights under the Fortification Act to draw his pistol and shoot Hoffman on the spot. Part of Hoffman thought he should have done just that, because he’d made that call himself in the past.

But maybe Prescott knew that calling in Gears to arrest the Chief of Staff—not just any old brass, a real Gear like them, one of their own—was going to unleash a shitload of trouble in its own right.

And maybe Prescott wasn’t sure they wouldn’t turn on him instead. He’d been prodding around that issue for weeks.

Hoffman now had no idea where to go next. He couldn’t argue about what he couldn’t decipher, he was pretty sure he couldn’t beat it out of the man, and the animal reflex—to punch him right in that smug, fucking patronizing face—wasn’t going to feel satisfying for more than a few seconds.

The only option left was to stop trying to guess what he was doing. It was letting him set the agenda. Hoffman simply had to ignore him. If that wasn’t a bloodless military coup, he wasn’t sure what was. The test would be which Gears followed him when the time came that his orders didn’t match Prescott’s.

Prescott just carried on gathering his stuff. Hoffman had to walk away and resist the temptation to pick up the ball left lying in his court.

He walked down the stairs, feeling like a complete asshole for not ripping the man a new one, but he knew that he didn’t have anything concrete to object to except never knowing what resources Prescott had kept hidden.

But in a world of shortages, just hiding resources was a life-threatening crime.

Yes. It is. Look at me, what I did at Anvil Gate. I’d still do it again. You don’t hold out on your neighbor when it’s life or death.

Hoffman passed Lowe and Rivera on the way out. They’d put their helmets on a windowsill while they stood around in the lobby eating a snack, and they looked at Hoffman as if they were embarrassed. Fine; it was no secret that Hoffman and the Chairman didn’t get on. It wouldn’t even make the grade as gossip.

He forced himself to focus on the immediate problems—of settling the civvies into even more temporary accommodation and making sure Michaelson had some kind of working fleet. He had to catch up with Bernie, too. She was the only friend he had, the only person who could and would hear him out. She’d put things in perspective. She’d make him feel that he wasn’t the most useless asshole in the world.

So what do I do with this disk now? And how can I get through two, three wars and still have to go running to Bernie to ask if I’m right or not?

He decided not to tell Michaelson about the disk yet, just in case it dropped the man in the shit. Michaelson had enough on his plate. He was also a political animal who actually enjoyed playing these goddamn balls-aching spy games with Prescott. It was going to be interesting to see if Prescott tried to recruit him.

Michaelson took Hoffman for an inspection tour of Dalyell. The carrier was still taking on water, and the crew—a maintenance team, nothing remotely like a full ship’s complement—was struggling to locate all the leaks.

“Save her, or save her spare parts?” Michaelson said sadly, splashing through knee-deep water. “Breaks my heart.”

“She’s worth saving as living quarters even if we can’t fuel her.”

“You look like you’ve had a fight, Victor.”

“Stop changing the subject.”

“I know you too well. It’s the flushing around the neck.” Michaelson gave him a sly wink. “Let me guess. Prescott? Because it’s not Trescu.”

Hoffman struggled to find a response he could live with. If he lied to Michaelson, then another relationship would be tainted.

“Very perceptive,” he said. “But what you don’t know can’t hurt you. Plausible deniability and all that bullshit. Let’s just say I’ve got some research to do first.”

“Just remember he’s a politician, Victor. They’re not like us little people.”

“Why do you hate his guts?”

Michaelson took a sudden interest in a run of pipework that was sagging from the deckhead. “Can’t pin it down, really. Not sure I hate him so much as don’t trust him. I just don’t like the cut of his jib.” He shrugged. “I prefer the ones whose disastrous lack of judgment I can see and point at. It’s his clinging to secrecy when there shouldn’t be anything left to conceal.”

Hoffman realized that Michaelson was right on just about every point, as he usually was. Hoffman didn’t find Trescu’s reticence anywhere near as threatening as Prescott’s. Trescu was an Indie, and an Indie who’d seen his entire nation reduced to a few thousand people. He was bound to be wary of telling his old enemy everything. It wasn’t the same as someone on your own team shutting you out of everything.

“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Hoffman said.

“But who’s actually running the COG now, Victor? We are. Nothing can happen without En-COG or Gears. We don’t have a confident, assertive civilian society—we haven’t had one since E-Day, maybe even earlier. Now we have these dangerous, uppity, foreign ideas seeping in from Trescu and even the Stranded. Prescott knows that like he knows his own name.”

“Your point?”

“He’s probably afraid. Scared politicians usually get very punchy and posture a lot.” Michaelson climbed the ladder to the next deck and tapped the heel of his hand against the bulkhead, listening as if he expected something to knock back. “Here’s the question. Does he govern? Is he fit to govern? And if he isn’t, who decides who is? Our only legal framework now is the Fortification Act. People are starting to talk about elections again.”

“I just shoot bad bastards. Was that a question?”

“Only if you have an answer.”

Hoffman had to think about that one. It was what Margaret would have called … elegant. “You love all this intrigue shit, don’t you?”

Michaelson smiled. He could give as good as he got with Prescott. Hoffman couldn’t. In that lonely desperation that usually tormented him when he was lumbered with a secret he didn’t want to have, he almost took the encrypted disk out of his pocket to show him. Maybe Michaelson even had some encryption key that would open it.

But it felt like too much too soon. These were dangerous times. He’d talk to Bernie first.

“I don’t love it,” Michaelson said. “I just accept it’s another warfighting skill I have to have.”

“Yeah,” Hoffman said. “Me, I prefer a chainsaw.”