CHAPTER 3

We can’t stop them. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know what they want. They don’t even seem to want territory. All they do is kill. We can’t even begin to negotiate with them, or work out their objectives, because we just don’t know the first damn thing about them. That’s not an enemy, Mr. Chairman. That’s a monster. (GENERAL BARDRY SALAMAN, CHIEF OF THE COG DEFENSE STAFF.)

CHAIRMAN’S OFFICE, HOUSE OF THE SOVEREIGNS, EPHYRA, ONE YEAR AFTER THE LOCUST EMERGENCE, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO. Father was dead, but even if he’d still been alive, he would have had no advice or answers to give his son now. Richard Prescott wasn’t fighting his father’s war anyway. It wasn’t about energy supplies or land. Nobody on Sera had ever fought this kind of enemy before; there were no rules or precedents, and a year and a month after the Locust Horde had erupted from the ground, Sera—human Sera—was close to collapse. I’ve been in office two months. I wouldn’t even be here if Dalyell hadn’t dropped dead. What do I know?

I know that we’re all going to die if I don’t pull this out of the fire now.

“Sir?” The office door opened slowly. “Sir, I’ve got Premier Deschenko on the line now. I’m sorry about the delay.”

The delay had been ten hours; Prescott had been trying to get hold of the man since last night. Jillian, his secretary, hadn’t left the office in days, but then few of his staff went home regularly each night now, and it wasn’t just a primal human need to huddle together with familiar faces. It was desperation. Somehow, there was a feeling that the answer might be around the next corner if they just kept on trying, or spent one more hour looking for a break.

“Good,” Prescott said. “Put him through.”

He pressed the phone to his ear and shut his eyes. It was easier to concentrate that way. He needed to hear every nuance in Deschenko’s voice, because he was going to ask the impossible, and he had to know if he was actually going to get it.

“Yori? How are you?”

“I’ve just had to order the retreat from Ostri.” Deschenko sounded hoarse and exhausted. “I mean the whole country. I’ve lost nearly twenty brigades since E-Day, and now I need the few troops I have left to defend Pelles.”

Prescott hadn’t expected good news anyway. But that wasn’t what he was seeking. “You know what I’m going to ask.”

“Richard, I can’t send troops to Tyrus or anywhere else. I have millions of refugees pouring over the border, and the best I can do is try to hold the north.”

“You still have chemical weapons.”

Deschenko fell silent. The Coalition of Ordered Governments was a strange beast to control. Prescott was its chairman, and its heart was—and always had been—in Ephyra, in Tyrus, but the operational reality was very different. It was a global alliance. Heads of COG states had to want to cooperate, or at least fear the wrath of the others if they tried to break ranks. Unilateral enforcement—the kind that didn’t require extreme measures, at least

—wasn’t in Prescott’s gift.

And he was on his own now. He knew it.

Where was the coalition? Every state had been hit hard by Locust attacks, and each was fighting its own war for the privilege of being the last to fold and die.

You’ve all given up. You cowards. You parochial little cowards.

“Yes, I have weapons,” Deschenko said. “But they’re my last resort, to defend Pelles. And they’ll kill us along with the grubs. They’re for the endgame, Richard.”

Oh yes. They are.

Apart from the names of cities and precise numbers of dead, this was a script that Prescott had almost learned by heart over the past few weeks, because every COG leader so far had taken the same position. They couldn’t think beyond their own boundaries. Nobody was ready to sacrifice the defense of their own citizens to support a combined strike.

They’ve given up. They’re just letting these bastards pick us off.

This wasn’t about Pelles, or Ostri, or Tyrus, or any other member state. This was about Sera, the entire world. This was about the survival of humankind.

“I realize I’m asking a great deal,” Prescott said carefully. “And I know I’m seen as the boy who’s just taken over the family firm and has to learn how things are really done around here. But I don’t have time, and neither does Sera.”

“Spell it out, Richard.”

“I’m asking you what I’ve asked every member state. Agree to this—a joint and coordinated assault on the main Locust infestations. Break their back.”

“Many of those locations happen to be in Tyrus…”

“There are no national boundaries now, Yori. The Locust don’t give a damn about our petty administrative detail. We’re all the same to them. Are you with me?”

Deschenko sounded as if he was swallowing repeatedly. He might have been grabbing a coffee, or just agonizing over a choice between disaster and apocalypse. But Prescott knew the answer would be the same either way. He just needed to know he’d done all he could to carry the argument.

“No, Richard,” Deschenko said at last. “I’m afraid I’m not.”

It was such a polite way to usher in mass destruction.

“Thank you, Yori. I understand your position.” Prescott paused, almost automatically wishing the man well, or luck, or some other banal blessing that would never come to pass. But it felt like a lie. He hadn’t yet learned to lie that easily. “Goodbye.”

Prescott stood staring out the window for a few minutes, aware of the TV screens on the walls on both sides of him, sound muted, spewing news bulletins that never seemed to change, but focused instead on the physical world he could see with his own eyes. Helicopters tracked across the sky. It was a beautiful sunny day, at odds with the ugly work that had to be done. If he switched off those TV sets, he could almost believe that life was going on as normal. He didn’t. He walked to the other window, the one that overlooked the rest of Ephyra, and stared at a view that stretched for twenty miles. Palls of smoke were visible, and old skyline landmarks had vanished. The Locust were almost at the gates.

One more try?

They’ve all turned me down, except the South Islands, and they’ve got nothing to contribute except Gears. This is going to take more than manpower.

“Jillian?” He held his finger on the intercom. “Get me the Attorney General, please. Not on the phone—ask him to come here as soon as he can.”

“Yes, sir. You know his brother’s still missing, don’t you?”

Everyone was grieving. “I do.”

Prescott sat down to wait, and turned up the sound on the monitors to watch the latest headlines. It astonished him that camera crews were still willing to go out and film the destruction. But what else could they do? In crisis, humans reverted to doing what they knew, part reflex, part comfort.

He was doing the same. He sat wondering why the final refusal from Deschenko—the confirmation that he had no control, that he’d failed to convince the rest of the COG that drastic action was all that was left—hadn’t crushed him. He felt cleansed by it. A burden had lifted.

God help me, do I actually want to do this?

No, he wasn’t a monster. He was sure of that. He knew what monsters looked like now. They were gray, and they came in many hideous forms, and they delighted in the suffering of humans. And they had to die, or all of humanity would be wiped out.

What have we done?

We should never have let it get this far. It has to stop, right now. Any way we can. He pressed the intercom again. “Jillian, it’s time you went home.”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“Do you have family anywhere else? Outside Jacinto, I mean.”

“Only my sister, sir. She’s in Tollen.”

“You might want to ask her to come and stay with you. Ephyra’s going to be the only part of Tyrus that’s safe from Locust. In fact, make it soon. The grubs are getting closer every day.”

Jillian paused, and that wasn’t like her. Prescott hoped she understood the urgency of moving her sister, and from that pause, he knew she understood at least a little of what he had in mind.

“Thank you, sir,” she said at last. “But I’ll wait here until the AG’s shown up. Is there anything else I can do in the meantime?”

Prescott wanted to sleep now. He decided he could manage a half -hour nap before anyone answered his summons.

“Yes,” he said. If it had to be done, it could be rolled up in one meeting. “I need to see General Salaman, too. And the Director of Special Forces—Hoffman. That rough little colonel with all the medals.”

“Yes, sir.”

Prescott had his quorum now. “And Adam Fenix. Get Professor Fenix. The meeting’s going to get technical.”

THE SANTIAGO HOUSEHOLD, EPHYRA.

“Maria? Maria, honey, are you there?”

Of course she was there. She hardly ever left the house now. Dom stood in the hallway and waited for a response. He knew where she’d be, and he could simply have walked upstairs and opened that bedroom door, but it was just too hard to see her sitting there staring at the cot. She wanted that quiet time, too. In the last year, they’d reached an understanding about no-go areas in this house as complex as any minefield in the war. He’d rented this house for them to be happy in it, for the kids to have a big backyard to play in, but it didn’t work out that way.

“Maria, I brought Marcus back.” Dom waited, listening for movement, giving her time to get herself together.

“I’m going to cook dinner. You come down when you’re ready, baby.”

Marcus was still standing on the doorstep, staring up at the birds. He always waited to be invited over the threshold now, as if he felt he was intruding, and that upset Dom; Marcus was family, and Dom’s house was his, anytime. With Bennie and Sylvia gone, Dom took nobody for granted now. He tugged at Marcus’s sleeve.

“Hey, come on. Kitchen duties.”

“You sure I’m not making this worse?”

“No. She likes to see you. You know that.”

They peeled vegetables and jointed the chicken in silence, while sounds of movement from upstairs indicated that Maria had left Sylvia’s room and gone into the bathroom. Dom knew her ritual: she’d close the door, and then spend fifteen minutes, almost to the second, putting a soaked ice -cold washcloth on her eyes to reduce the swelling.

But he’d still know she’d been crying for hours. No amount of sympathy or tablets could change the fact that their kids were dead—and their parents, and cousins, and half their friends. The fact that the Santiagos were like millions of other utterly broken and bereaved people across Tyrus—across the whole world—didn’t ease the pain one bit.

It just meant that the neighbors didn’t ask dumb -ass questions, or make stupid but well -meaning comments about time being such a great fucking healer, because they were mostly bereaved, too. Bullshit. I haven’t even healed about Carlos, and that was three years ago. Well, if they weren’t bereaved yet, they had family serving as Gears. It was only a matter of time.

“What do I do with these?” Marcus held up the wine. He was raiding his father’s priceless cellar a few bottles at a time, but he wasn’t much of a drinker, and he certainly wasn’t a chef. “Which one’s for the chicken?”

“The white one. Red makes everything a funny color.”

Marcus studied both labels, then uncorked the bottle of white. “I’m impressed.”

“Why?”

“You, learning to cook like this.”

“Well … you know.” Maria had problems getting her act together around the house some days, and Dom began doing stuff to stop her from feeling bad about it. Then it seemed to cheer her up a little to have dinner cooked for her. As long as he was cooking, he knew she was eating properly, even if it was only when he was home on leave. “I don’t know what else to do for her.”

“Look, I’m passing this on because I promised I would,” Marcus said. “Dad says Maria can stay at the estate anytime. He’s worried about her being here alone. He’ll hire someone to keep her company. And he’s got access to all the top doctors.” Marcus stopped dead. The quiet embarrassment on his face said that he knew his father meant well, but that Dom’s answer would be no. “Sorry, Dom. You know my father. He thinks science can fix anything.”

Dom looked away and found the pan of rice suddenly of great interest. Gestures like that choked him up instantly. The Fenix family estate was a huge empty mausoleum of a place, intimidating and magnificent, and Adam Fenix was a bit too much like his home, a man with no idea how to be anything other than distant and focused on his work. But there was a kind father in there trying to get out, desperate to do the right thing; he just didn’t seem sure how regular people showed that they cared.

“That’s really, really generous, Marcus.” Dom felt his voice cracking. “Your dad’s a good man. Tell him thanks, but Maria needs to be here. You know. The bedrooms are …”

He didn’t finish the sentence. The word was shrines. Dom understood that completely, but it still freaked him out. He’d done it himself. He didn’t want to touch his father’s workshop; he could still see them all in it, tinkering with some engine—Carlos, Marcus, Dad, Mom wandering in with sandwiches. But he walked away from it, because that was how you made yourself accept that they were never coming back. Maria walked into the kitchen and gave Marcus a big deliberate smile, but her eyes were dead. As always, though, she looked beautiful—perfectly groomed, hair immaculate, full makeup. That gave Dom hope that she’d mend, because she hadn’t let herself go. Shit, it was just over a year; how could anyone finish grieving in that time? He was expecting too much. But he just wanted to see her pain stop.

And then I’ll have nothing left to do but look at my own.

“Have you seen your dad?”

Maria’s voice sounded hoarse and thick. She had a habit of plunging straight into topics now, as if she’d been having a conversation in her head that had just leaked out. Marcus accepted a peck on the cheek from her, blinking as if he’d noticed.

“I haven’t seen him since I got back,” he said. “He’s pretty busy.”

“You’ve got to spend time with him.” Maria took firm hold of Marcus’s hand. “Promise me.”

“I’ll see him.” Marcus nodded, looking embarrassed. “I promise.”

“Come on, sit down, both of you,” Dom said, shepherding them toward the living room. It had to be her medication. She seemed much more spacey today. “Let’s have a drink while the dinner’s cooking.”

It was good wine. Dom didn’t know much about vintages, but the Fenix family was rich, seriously rich, and this stuff was twenty-six years old—older than him. Whatever it was, it had cost a fortune; the chicken was swimming in something that had probably cost a week’s wages. But with rationing, money was ceasing to mean much. The chicken was a rare treat, not because he couldn’t afford it on a Gear’s pay—shit, they were getting paid on time, even now—but because the Locust had trashed farms and food factories, disrupted freight traffic, all the little invisible things that put food on the table of a big capital city.

“Animals,” Dom said, holding the glass up to the light while he racked his brains for another neutral topic of conversation. The wine looked more brick-red than ruby. Marcus always said that showed it had bottle age.

“Animals are smarter than us. We get a power outage or some factory gets blown up, and we fall apart. We need so much stuff. Animals—they just get up in the morning, find food, and carry on. No piped water supply—we drown in our own sewage, but animals just stay clean. If they’ve got white fur, it stays white. Imagine the state we’d be in if we had white fur.”

Marcus looked as if he was going to say something, but just did a slow blink and nodded. He’d stopped himself at the last moment. Whatever it was he’d been planning to say, it probably had the word death or kill in it, and he never used either in front of Maria. It was one of those little silent clues that told Dom what really went on in Marcus’s head.

“That’s what shaving’s for,” Marcus said at last.

“You okay, honey ?” Dom topped up Maria’s glass. She was looking distinctly distant now. “You didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“I remembered to take my pills.” The doctor had prescribed antidepressants. “I’ve got to go out later. Just a nap, and then I’ll go out. I go out every day when you’re not here. I have to.”

Dom didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, and hoped it was the medication talking. He wasn’t sure if she felt hemmed in by this house and its memories and needed a break from the four walls, or if she just went for a walk to stretch her legs.

“Yeah, you’re too sleepy to go out now.” He stroked her hair. “Maybe the doc needs to look at your dose again.”

“Have a nap if you feel like it,” Marcus said. “You don’t have to entertain me. We’ll wake you up when dinner’s ready.”

Maria leaned back in the chair and fell asleep in minutes. Dom crept over to her to check, listening to her breathing; yes, she was definitely out of it.

Marcus got up slowly and gestured to the kitchen.

“It’s just a year,” Dom said, closing the door behind him. “I’m pushing her too fast.”

“Anything I can do. Just say.”

“Yeah.”

“And stop blaming yourself.”

“She’s the one with the blame problem. She’s still saying that if she hadn’t sent the kids to her folks’ for the day, they’d be alive now. She thinks she let the grubs get them.”

“Shit, Dom …” It wasn’t as if Marcus hadn’t heard it before. But it always seemed to upset him to be reminded of it, and he looked as if he was about to offer some insight. “Ah, forget it. Explaining to someone why they’re not to blame doesn’t actually help. They have to work it out for themselves.”

Dom assumed it was all about Marcus’s mother. When she went missing, he was sure that Marcus felt responsible, in that weird way that anxious kids often did.

“I need you to see something,” Dom said. “I feel bad showing you, but I have to show someone.” He beckoned Marcus to follow him, and led him upstairs to the bedrooms. “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, but…

maybe it’ll make more sense to you next time I come out with some crazy shit or other.”

Dom opened the door of Sylvia’s room. Marcus just peered inside, going no further than the doorway. So it hits him that way, too.

Nothing had been changed since the day that Sylvia—two years old, born the night Dom had taken part in the raid on Aspho Point—had been collected by her grandparents for a day out. Her stuffed toys were still on the windowsill, minus the green striped caterpillar she insisted on taking everywhere. All her bedding, the clothes in the drawers, even the clothes in the laundry basket hadn’t been moved. Maria just cleaned around it all.

Marcus drew a deep breath and stepped back. He might have said shit to himself. Dom wanted him to understand what haunted him when he tried to sleep. If Marcus couldn’t make sense of it, then nobody could. Dom shut the door and then opened Benedicto’s room.

Marcus leaned against the door frame as if he expected the paint to be wet, and just scanned the room again, halted at that invisible barrier. It was hard not to follow his eyes; they were almost unnaturally pale blue, so they always drew Dom’s focus. Marcus started blinking a lot. Even if he’d been the chatty kind, he probably wouldn’t have had much to say about this. He drew back after a minute or so and wandered across to the window on the landing.

If he was anything like Dom, then it would have been the tiny pair of thrashball boots on the bed that finished him off.

“Yeah, I just can’t go in there,” Dom said. “Not even Bennie’s room. Maria spends hours in one room or the other. Now, is it me who’s nuts for not being able to go in, or her for not being able to get rid of it all?”

Life had to go on, war or no war, and Maria’s folks wanted as much time with the kids as possible. Bennie—

four, Dom’s heart and soul—had been really excited about seeing their new apartment. They had a cat, a stray that had shown up out of nowhere, and Bennie wanted to play with it.

“Nobody’s nuts,” Marcus said. “Everyone finds their own way of coping.”

“I shouldn’t lay all this shit on you.”

“It’s okay.”

Marcus could usually make Dom feel that things really were okay, but some situations were beyond that. They went back to the kitchen, listened to the radio news channel in silence, and then served dinner, all three of them somehow managing to keep up the illusion of enjoying the event. Maria seemed a little brighter. No, it wasn’t an illusion. It was an affirmation. Dom had to see it that way. He believed that if he tried hard enough, if the state put enough effort into it, then the war would end and life could begin to get back to normal, even if it took five years—ten, maybe. But it would come.

He just didn’t know what it was going to take to turn the tide.

Marcus kept taking a discreet look at his watch, probably trying to work out the best time to call his father. He might even have been working up to it. He never seemed to find it easy to talk to him. Maria picked up the phone from the sideboard and set it down in front of Marcus. “Nobody’s too busy to want to hear from their own son.” Then she started clearing the table.

It was the first time she’d said anything like that in a normal tone—even the word son— since E -Day. Dom followed her into the kitchen while Marcus called his dad.

“You okay, baby?”

“He’s got to talk to his dad. They shouldn’t be apart this much.”

So that was starting to get to her: separation, not letting kids get too far from you. “We’ll get through this, I promise.”

“You never give in. That’s what I love about you. You never quit.”

Dom seized the briefest change of mood and clarity. This was how recovery started, the doctor said. “I’d never give up on you.” He took her hand out of the dishes and wiped away the soapsuds. “I need to get you another ring, don’t I?”

Maria’s hands had swollen so much when she was pregnant that she’d had to have her wedding band cut off. She hadn’t worn a ring since. It made Dom feel uneasy, because a guy’s wife had to have a nice ring, a symbol that someone loved her more than anything.

She touched the pendant he’d given her. “I’ve got this, Dom. I’ll wear it until the day I die.”

“Yeah, but—”

“What have you got? You don’t have a ring.” It was true; rings snagged inside his gloves, and they were a real hazard when handling cables and machinery. “You’ve got to have something. I’ve never given you something to keep with you. We’ve got to have something so that we’re together.”

She wiped her hands and started looking through the kitchen drawers where most of the household paperwork ended up. Eventually she pulled out a photograph and grabbed a pen.

“Here.” She wrote something on the back of the photo and handed it to him. “Remember this?”

It was a picture that Carlos had taken of them in a bar off Embry Square, just before Dom began commando training. Dom turned over the photo to read what she’d written.

“So you’ll always have me with you,” she said. “Don’t let me go. Keep it in your pocket. Please.”

“You know I will.”

When he put his arms around her these days, he felt as if she was clinging to him for safety. There was nothing harder than picking up his holdall and leaving her behind. He was determined to cherish every minute of the leave he had left, even if it meant stopping her from sitting in those dead, frozen bedrooms.

“He’s busy.”

Marcus’s voice made Dom jump. “Your dad …”

“He got a call to see the man.” Marcus shrugged. He’d put his I-don’t-really-care face on. “His secretary at the uni said she didn’t know when he’d be back. Can’t say no to Prescott.”

“Sorry, Marcus.”

“Hey, got to go. I’ll pick you up when it’s time to ship out, Dom. Take care of yourself, Maria.”

And Marcus was gone, just like that: no hugs, no gradually edging toward the door, just a clear signal that he was going, and he never looked back. He wasn’t keen on goodbyes.

Was anybody these days? Goodbyes had a habit of being permanent. The worst thing, Dom decided, was that he could remember none of his.

CHAIRMAN’S OFFICE, HOUSE OF THE SOVEREIGNS.

All politicians were assholes, but at least Prescott cut the crap and said what was on his mind. Hoffman could find something in that to admire. How long would it last, though ? The idealistic and the outspoken all got ground flat in the end—not that some of them had far to go. Adam Fenix was supposed to be here.

And Prescott wants me here because …

The last time Hoffman had been summoned to this level of meeting with Fenix present, he’d been tasked with sabotaging a weapon of mass destruction. The damn grubs must have come up with a new toy. It wasn’t as if they needed it. Maybe they were just getting bored with having to gut every human by hand, and they wanted the planet to themselves sooner rather than later.

“Attorney General,” Prescott said, “what are my options under the Fortification Act?”

The AG, Milon Audley, was past retirement age and looked like he’d seen it all before. “You may use it to declare martial law in part or all of the COG territories. Normally, the vote is carried even if—”

“No voting.” Prescott faced them across a table, not lounging behind his desk or staring out the window as if they were incidental to his plans. “I have the authority to declare martial law without consulting the assembly, haven’t I?”

Hoffman had the kind of peripheral vision honed by years of trying to keep an eye on superior officers about to drop him in the shit. Salaman didn’t seem to be bothered. Martial law was just turning up the volume on what was happening now, after all. Prescott obviously wanted to keep his fledgling administration looking clean, doing everything by the book. Maybe he wanted to go down in history as the last and only moral leader.

“You do,” Audley said, “but it’s ill -advised, because you won’t be able to enforce it outside Tyran borders without effectively declaring war on every other COG state. You don’t want to do that, do you, sir?”

“All I want to know is whether it’s legal. Whether it’s constitutional.”

Audley was on the spot, and it was clear that even his lawyer’s shark brain couldn’t work out Prescott’s angle. Hoffman knew that look: the quick lick of the lips, a flicker of the eyes, the moment any adviser dreaded, when a yes or no to an apparently straight question would become something with a frightening life of its own, something that would come back to bite you hard on the ass. Hoffman had been there.

“It’s legal, Chairman, but it’s not a good move,” Audley said at last. Bets were hedged. Asses were covered.

“I’d advise discussion with the Secretary for Interstate Relations.”

“I’ve passed that stage, Milon. I just needed to know that I wouldn’t be acting illegally. I do have a pragmatic reason.”

“Not a constitutional one, then …”

“I’m going to restore the Fortification Act and declare martial law throughout the COG.” Prescott looked away toward the door as it opened and Adam Fenix walked in. “Good evening, Professor. Take a seat.”

“Apologies, Chairman. Roadblocks.”

“Just so that we’re all up to speed … the Attorney General has advised me that I’m within my rights to use the Fortification Act to declare martial law.”

Hoffman had decided some years ago that whatever was admirable in Adam Fenix’s son had come from the maternal side of the gene pool. Fenix put a folder of papers on the desk in front of him but didn’t open it, almost as if he wasn’t sure he was in the right meeting and might have to up sticks and go find the right room.

“Would you like to give me some context, Chairman?” he said.

Prescott meshed his fingers and leaned his elbows on the table. “I want you all to understand that what I’m about to say is born of last resort. General, in layman’s terms, as of today, how do you evaluate our chances against the Locust?”

Salaman perked up a little. “Depends who you mean by us, sir.”

“I think I mean Tyrus. I’ve seen enough in the last few weeks to know that some states are closer to collapse than others, whatever they say.”

“We’ll still be overrun in a month, then,” Salaman said. “Militarily—we’re hemorrhaging. The infrastructure is collapsing globally. Civilian casualties—if they’re not slaughtered by the grubs, then they’re dying of disease, and refugee movement is spreading more cross -border infection. You can’t dump millions of corpses on the system and maintain disease control. We’re finished, sir. I’m sorry. The grubs are in pretty well every city on the planet.”

Fenix looked at Hoffman. Maybe he thought they had some kind of rapport and that Hoffman would have a different opinion. He didn’t.

“Remember that we no longer have any emergency command bunkers outside Ephyra, either,” Hoffman said.

“We don’t even have the option of saving the chosen few and the art treasures and sitting it out, as we had in the last war.”

“All destroyed?” Prescott didn’t look disappointed for some reason. “Even Cherrit?”

“That’s the problem with underground facilities and a burrowing enemy, sir. I hope they appreciate fine art and canned beans.”

Prescott took a breath. He looked too young. He was in his late thirties, and there were a few gray hairs in his beard, but he was remarkably unlined. A few more months in office would put that straight. But we don’t have months. It’s weeks.

“Gentlemen, I’m going to deploy the Hammer of Dawn,” Prescott said.

It wasn’t the first time that Hoffman had been caught totally off guard by a COG chairman, nor the first when the realization hit him that Adam Fenix was here to do the dirty science work. And me. Now I know why I’m here, too.

“Sir, that’s just not possible.” Fenix seemed to think that Prescott was just kiting an idea. Hoffman could see he wasn’t. The man had a stillness about him—no fidgeting, no sweating, not a hint of uncertainty—that said he’d made his decision. “It’s not a tactical weapon. It’s strategic. You can’t deploy it in urban areas, and that’s the kind of war we’re fighting.”

“Losing,” Prescott said quietly. “Right now, we’re losing the war. And that will not happen on my watch. This is where it ends.”

Hoffman glanced at Salaman, and they both knew this was now about how it would be carried out, not if. Audley simply bowed his head and said nothing.

Fenix was still staring at Prescott, demanding an answer with raised eyebrows. Hoffman wondered if he ever yelled or lost his temper.

“You do know how the Hammer works, Chairman?” Fenix said.

“Not the physics, but I do grasp the fact that the satellite platforms cover the entire planet, which is what I require.”

“What are you going to target? Is that what you need me for, to advise on blast coverage?”

Salaman cut in. “Grubs don’t take over cities, sir. They clear them. They’ll only be in areas where there are humans to kill and resources to plunder. They strip a city and move on.”

“I know that, General,” Prescott said. “I know that very well. They’re using our own equipment and supplies against us. They adapt our own technology to kill us. We’re feeding their war effort. So we stop them. We destroy everything in their path. And a lot of grubs will die, too—not all, but this is about asset denial.”

I know where this is going now. God help us.

Hoffman found himself wanting to call Margaret, not to warn her but just to hear her voice, and he hadn’t felt that way about her for years. It was as close as he’d come in his adult life to panic. Fear—he’d lived with it for so long that he wasn’t sure if he could perform well without it. But this was different. There was no border across which life would go on after surrender or a victory.

“Okay, sir,” Salaman said. “Have you thought about what we’ll have left to fight the grubs who survive?”

“The only major center of population that they don’t appear to be able to penetrate far is Ephyra—Jacinto in particular,” Prescott said. He stood up and unfurled the global map on his wall. “Largest unbroken area of granite on Sera. And that’s where we’ll regroup. I want the entire Hammer network deployed. Salaman, I need a priority list, because we’re going to have to do this in stages—am I right, Professor?” Prescott turned around, one finger still on the black type that said EPHYRA. “We feed in the coordinates for the first batch of targets, activate the lasers, then feed in the next batch, move the orbital platforms, and so on. We don’t have enough orbital devices to sweep Sera in one simultaneous attack, do we?”

Shit.

Shit, this is planet denial, not asset denial.

“What the hell do you propose to do with the people in those cities, Chairman?” Fenix sat back in his chair as if he’d been winded. “This is going to incinerate millions of our own people. Do you understand me? This is wholesale slaughter.”

I don’t want to hear this.

I know what the options are going to be.

And I helped the COG grab the Hammer technology.

Prescott waited a few beats, looking at Fenix as if he was the difficult kid in the class who just didn’t get the math and needed a bit of prompting. For a moment, Audley looked as if he was going to intervene, but he just shifted position and looked as if he’d given up. He wouldn’t be alone. Everyone else except Prescott had.

“I’m ordering an evacuation to Ephyra,” Prescott said. “We’ll give refuge to anyone who can make their way here. Three days after the announcement we deploy the Hammer.”

“We—can’t—move—millions—of—people—in—three—days.” Fenix slammed his fist on the table to emphasize every word. Fenix, Mr. Stiff Upper Lip, the man who never reacted, had finally lost it. Hoffman didn’t want to watch this disintegration; there was no satisfaction in it. It just confirmed that he was right to feel that he should be shitting himself right now. “They’ll die. They’ll all die.”

Prescott looked to Salaman and nodded for a response.

“Once we announce the recall, we have to assume the grubs will know,” Salaman said. “And when people start moving in numbers, they’ll just home in on them. So it has to be fast—or it has to be covert.”

“What, we don’t tell people we’re going to fry the goddamn planet?” Hoffman said. “So we just spare Tyrus?

And who gets told it’s time to run?”

“There’s a balance to be struck between giving people adequate time to evacuate without giving the enemy time to react,” Prescott said. “I have to tell the people what the stakes are, but we want to catch the Locust on the wrong foot, too. That’s always an ethical dilemma in war. How many of our own people did we allow to die in the Pendulum Wars because alerting them to attacks would reveal too much about our latest intelligence?”

Fenix spread his hands. “Ethical? Good God, this is about a weapon of mass destruction, not a single conventional attack.”

“Don’t start on the old ethics shit again, Fenix,” Hoffman snapped. “You made the Hammer technology operational, so don’t tell me we can’t use it when we need it most. My men died to get it for you. It’s your fucking bomb. What did you think we’d use it for, a toaster? And just how bad did you think things would have to get before we’d need to use it?”

“It was intended as a deterrent.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t realize it was loaded. It was just there to scare burglars.”

“This is precisely the kind of extreme scenario we envisaged using the Hammer for,” Prescott said, ignoring the spat. “If you can think of a more extreme one, Professor, do say.”

“This means destroying most of our civilization to save a fraction of it—if we save any of it at all.” Fenix started fiddling with his pen, turning it over between his fingers like he was tightening a bolt. “And what will we be left with? That level of destruction has two phases—what it kills immediately, and what it kills for months or years afterward by debris thrown into the atmosphere, by chemicals released by combustion into water tables and

—”

“Professor, do you have an alternative? That’s not rhetorical. You’ve been a Gear. Do you disagree with the military assessment?”

“Not substantially.”

“Then is there anything we can do differently, other than wait to be picked off? If you have anything at all to suggest, any avenue we haven’t explored, then I urge you to say so now.”

The argument took Hoffman back three years, to when he’d clashed with Fenix over who needed to die to seize the Hammer technology from the Union of Independent Republics. Fenix couldn’t stomach the need to kill enemy weapons scientists. He was great at saying what was wrong, what was immoral, but he was shit at making the hard call between ugly and uglier. And those were usually the only choices in war. Prescott was still waiting.

Fenix looked as if he was going to say something, then shook his head. It took a few more moments for him to answer. Prescott didn’t hurry him.

“I can’t think of anything else that will stop them in the time we have,” Fenix said eventually. “The incursions have gone too far. If we’d had more time … there could have been other ways we might have stopped them.”

“Let me be clear. There might be alternatives? Can you develop those in the weeks we have left?”

“No.” Fenix looked defocused again for a moment, anguished, probably crunching numbers in his head and unable to make them add up. “No. We’ve run out of time. It’s all too late.”

Prescott’s gaze flickered for a moment. “Thank you, Professor.”

“But we can’t accommodate everyone who wants to evacuate, even if they can reach Ephyra in time. The city can’t absorb the global population. Not even with millions already dead.”

“I know,” Prescott said. “It’s brutal. I accept that it’s the illusion of compassion. But either we save who we can, what we can, and preserve humankind, or we do the equitable thing and let everyone share extinction. It’s my call. We’re taking back Sera, starting now.”

“Kill it to save it.” Fenix shook his head. “And what the hell do you think our society will become?”

“A human society that’s fit to survive,” said Prescott. He walked over to the inlaid desk that had been used by every COG chairman for nearly eighty years and laid some sheets of paper on it as if he was going to make notes.

“I’m taking full personal responsibility. You don’t need to. You’re only following orders. Milon, you don’t have to take any further part in this. Thank you for your counsel.”

The Attorney General rose slowly, as if his back hurt him, and walked to the door. He looked even older than he had when he’d come in. “I’ll prepare the legal instrument, sir. After all, what you’re doing is … constitutional, and I have no grounds to refuse.”

“This remains strictly confidential, Milon. Within this room.”

“I took that as a given, sir.”

The door closed behind Audley, and there was a moment’s silence punctuated by the distant whoomp-whoomp of artillery fire. Hoffman rarely noticed it. It was a permanent background noise now.

“I’m not just following orders, Chairman,” said Salaman. “Either I’m with you or I have to quit this post. What about you, Victor?”

“There’s nothing else I can offer, General.”

Hoffman tried to freeze the moment to examine why he was agreeing to it—not that opposing it would make any difference. It was lawful, and he had agreed to involvement. Was he being selfish? Ephyra first—we’re all right, screw the rest of you. Maybe he was just resigned to the inevitable. “Maybe we should have thought about concentrating on asset denial earlier, before the grubs got a foothold, and when we had more time to evacuate people.”

Hindsight was a wonderful thing. Fenix stared at him as if he was a pile of shit.

“We’d still have been killing people,” Fenix said quietly. He placed his briefcase on the table and unlocked it, rummaging around inside. “Our own people. And the numbers don’t change that.”

“Keys, gentlemen,” said Prescott. He opened a desk drawer and took out a small socket-shaped metal cap.

“General?”

Salaman reached inside the collar of his shirt and eased out his COG-tag. His Hammer command key was on the same chain.

It was all very low-tech and banal, this global destruction business. Hoffman fished his key out of his pants pocket, unclipped the chain, and held it up. His front door keys were next to it.

“I never knew,” Fenix said, staring at Hoffman’s hand.

Hoffman hadn’t realized that Fenix didn’t know who held the third command key to activate the weapon. “It goes with the DSF job. Don’t take it personally.”

“Professor, do you understand now why I wanted to be reassured this was legal?” Prescott was still very calm, all business, not bad at all for a brand -new chairman whose first big headline was going to be WORLD ENDS

TODAY. “I wouldn’t ask you to be complicit in an unlawful act. I now need your best estimate of how hard we can strike and how far. General Salaman will keep you apprised of Locust movement so that we make every Hammer strike count. Within the next three weeks, I want a window of three to four days when we have the Hammer ready to deploy, and when I can announce the recall to Ephyra. Of course, if you object, I’ll have to coopt one of your staff.”

“The Hammer is my responsibility,” Fenix said. “I wouldn’t pass the buck to anyone else.”

Prescott sat down at his desk and began writing. “Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll inform the Cabinet of my decision a short time before I make the public announcement to invoke martial law and declare Ephyra a sanctuary zone. How short depends on how we assess the risk of information leaking and starting a panic. The evacuation period starts from then. I favor three days, unless anyone has a compelling practical argument otherwise. But this has to be fast.”

Three, five, ten—it didn’t make much difference. There wasn’t enough room for the whole world.

“Three it is, sir,” said Salaman.

“A panic,” Fenix repeated quietly. “What do you think we already have?”

“I don’t know quite how you work, Professor.” Prescott just kept going. “Can you keep this under wraps at your end, or will you have staff who need to be briefed?”

Fenix’s shoulders sagged. “I can do it on my own. Like I said—this is my responsibility.”

Fenix grabbed his briefcase and walked out. Hoffman headed for the side exit with Salaman, and found that his hands were shaking.

“Shit,” Salaman said. “I’m going to grab a drink.”

“I miss my NCO days,” said Hoffman. “See you in the morning.”

Hoffman walked back to the apartment, rehearsing how and when he would tell Margaret that he’d just put his name to the destruction of almost every city on Sera, and most of its citizens. Yes, he missed being a sergeant.