CHAPTER 16

The COG isn’t a superpower any longer, and we’re not a national government. We’re just city hall with an army, a navy, and the power of life and death. Prescott’s a mayor with weapons of mass destruction. That simplifies things a great deal, but it also means small issues have big consequences.

(CAPTAIN QUENTIN MICHAELSON, DISCUSSING POLITICAL REALITY IN A SHRINKING WORLD WITH COLONEL VICTOR HOFFMAN.) TEMPORARY DETENTION AREA, MAIN ADMINISTRATION BLOCK, VECTES NAVAL BASE, NINE WEEKS AFTER THE EVACUATION OF

JACINTO, 14 A.E.

“Victor, he can’t expect leniency for rape. A trial would send out a very clear message.”

Bernie could hear Prescott’s polished, expensively educated voice in the corridor. She’d never heard a wrangle between Hoffman and the Chairman firsthand before. It was like overhearing the grown -ups fighting, both terrifying and fascinating, and somehow all her fault.

“Make your mind up, Chairman.” Hoffman’s voice strained at its seams. “Either we have a tribunal for Stranded criminals, your precious one law for all, or we do what martial law entitles us to do. You can’t run both systems at once.”

“Our women need reassurance that we’ll protect them in an uncertain world.” Prescott sounded more distant, as if he was walking away, a man with something more important to do. “I’m not politically squeamish, but I want to avoid descending into governance by vague terror. Much better that everyone knows why people suddenly disappear.”

Good old Prescott. Squeamish? Press that Hammer of Dawn button and stand back …

But Bernie saw his point. She was on the verge of going out there and saying that it was fine, okay, whatever they wanted; she’d go through with a trial. She wasn’t ashamed. And didn’t everyone—normal, average everyone

—think that rapists and perverts in general deserved a hole in the head? She’d get a medal, just as Baird had told her.

But how’s the average citizen going to feel about Gears when they hear how I did it?

The fact that she’d been a civilian when she killed the other two rapists was irrelevant. She was a Gear again now. And nothing could take the regiment out of her blood.

Hoffman sounded as if he was walking after Prescott. “I won’t have one of my Gears forced to tell the world exactly what those animals did to her. And we don’t want civilians to hear how she dealt with it. Do we?

Undermines respect. They wouldn’t understand.”

Vic’s ashamed of me. Oh God. He’s actually ashamed of me.

Prescott went quiet. Bernie thought he’d walked off.

“Good point,” he said at last. “Deal with it, Victor.”

“Chairman, give me a clear instruction for once, goddamn it.”

“Do whatever you feel will do least damage to morale. I’ll back you completely.”

I bet you will…

Bernie found it sobering that even a man with an army at his disposal couldn’t piss people off too much in this microcosm of a world. Everything existed on a knife-edge. Hoffman stormed back into the office and stood with fists clenched, shaking his head slowly.

“I’m sorry, Vic,” she said.

“Don’t you dare apologize.” He grabbed her shoulders, harder than he probably meant to. “Damn it, woman, why didn’t you tell me right away? I’d … I’d have handled you better.”

“Vic, I’m okay. I don’t bake a cake to celebrate the anniversary, but it doesn’t stop me living, either. Every good time I have is a big fuck-you to that bastard in there.”

“I’m not having all that paraded at a trial.”

“I’m in two minds about it.”

“You don’t seriously want to give that filth his day in court.”

“Chairman’s right—he has to be seen to be punished. I don’t care who knows what happened. But what I did

—what will that do to the reputation of every other Gear? We’re the good guys, remember? Mr. Average Civvie out there won’t see me as a civilian victim.”

“So no trial. Good.” Hoffman nodded, looking at the door on the other side of the office. Jonn Massy was locked in an adjoining room, waiting. How long he had to live and how he died would be decided in the next few minutes. That was sobering, too.

“Are you ashamed of me, Vic?” she asked. “Because it’s okay if you are.”

“No, no. Never.”

“Not even slightly worried about what’s in me?”

“It’s in all of us, Bernie.”

“I didn’t believe I could do it. And once I started, it was all too easy.”

Hoffman snorted. “You think Massy and his kind agonize like this? They just rob, kill, and rape. Then they get up the next morning and do it all over again.”

“Is that the decency line, then? They do it and don’t lose sleep, but we do it and wrestle with our conscience?

Or we only feel guilty when it’s another human and not a grub? Because I still carved those bastards, either way, and they felt pain as much as any grub. And I don’t feel bad about causing pain—I feel bad about finding it was easier than I thought.”

“We should have had this talk months ago.” Hoffman locked the door. The room was sparsely furnished, not yet filled with the paper and general mess of a long-used office. “All I care about now is what happens to you, and what happens to all my other Gears. Prescott can take care of the rest of civilization.”

“You know something ? I fled back to the army. That’s civilization to me. I didn’t want to become like the vermin I saw. That scared me a lot more than combat ever did. I don’t think it’s even morality talking. Just dread.”

Hoffman stared her straight in the eye for what felt like forever, but with no judgment, just a sad kind of regret. He’d had to do some serious shit in his time, too. She knew that. But he’d acted in the moment, not gone back to settle scores in cold blood. And she still didn’t know if that made the difference or not.

“Come on, let’s get this over with.” He checked his pistol again and gripped the door handle. “What do you want to do? Just say the word.”

Bernie never doubted Massy was the right man. She didn’t doubt that a death sentence for all his gang’s crimes

—not just for her, for all the innocent Stranded killed and terrorized—was the right one. There were just parts of her that were more troubled by other things these days. She felt her anger was getting threadbare. She wasn’t even sure now if it was anger.

What the hell do I want?

“Let me talk to him,” she said.

Jonn Massy was handcuffed. Part of her said to take the cuffs off rather than kick the shit out of a bound man, which suddenly struck her as bizarre: she was a lean woman—not frail, never, not yet—pushing sixty, and he was half her age, built like a brick shit-house. The regiment embedded a sense of manly, square-jawed fair play even in its women.

What a joke.

Hoffman stood to one side, looking ready to put himself between her and Massy. For a moment, Bernie thought of Marcus, that sad disapproval or whatever it was on his face when she showed signs of going feral, and realized just how much his opinion bothered her.

I know he’s right. Once I kick off the revenge killings, it becomes the way we do things. And then we fall apart as a society.

But Massy needed to pay for everything he’d ever done. That was what held society together: facing the consequences of your actions.

Even now, he had that same arrogant leer on his face. She could smell him, too. It wasn’t body odor. It was just him, and it had been a long time before she’d been able to get that smell out of her nostrils.

“So why come here?” she asked. “Your buddies must have told you I was back. You didn’t think I’d recognize you?”

Massy still looked confident, if not relaxed. “And I just walked in here. Didn’t I? How many others have you let in that you didn’t recognize, who didn’t leave witnesses? We’re inside your walls, bitch. You’ll all pay for my brother.” He winked slowly. “Maybe I came in to finish you off. Just so the COG knows it’s not untouchable.”

“So why did you crap yourself and make a run for it?”

“Live to fight another day …”

“Okay, I’ll shoot every last damn one of you, then, just to be certain,” Hoffman said. “Because I can do that.”

“But you won’t, you dumb old bastard, because you haven’t. The COG’s gone soft. That’s why the grubs forced you out. We’ll be here long after you’ve gone—we’re fit to survive. You’re not.”

Hoffman drew his sidearm and handed it to Bernie, all matter-of-fact. She had her own pistol, but there was a hell of a lot said silently when he did that.

“You going to gloat, bitch?” Massy asked. “I’m not afraid of you. I taught you that you’re nothing and that we can do whatever we like with you. You’re never going to forget that.”

Bernie had a sudden urge to pull the trigger. It passed as soon as it came; she actually wanted to laugh, and wasn’t sure why. Stress made you do all kinds of weird things at the wrong times, but—this was a sense of revelation.

It’s a contest. He keeps setting the rules for me. Okay, that stops now. She handed the pistol back to Hoffman. He put it to Massy’s temple without a second’s hesitation.

“I’ll finish the job,” he said. “You want to wait outside or not, Bernie? You don’t have to be involved.”

Massy smirked. “See, no guts—”

Hoffman grabbed Massy’s hair in his free hand and jerked his head back. The old bugger was more frightening when he was ice-cold, and he certainly was now.

Massy still wasn’t pleading for his life, though. Did she want that? Yes, she did. He had to be brought down and then obliterated, so that others could see that men like him could be broken. He managed to look Hoffman in the eye. “You’ll have nightmares about me after you pull that trigger, old man. I’ll still own you.”

“You’re too young to remember Anvil Gate,” Hoffman said quietly. “You think this is the first time I’ve done a dirty job?”

You don’t tell me everything, Vic. Do you?

Bernie closed her fingers over the pistol’s bulky barrel and pressed Hoffman’s hand down slowly. It was a dangerous thing to do to a man with a chambered round and the safety off. She might have been a millisecond from getting her hand blown apart, or worse. But she had control now. She knew it.

“No, he doesn’t get to jerk anyone’s else’s chain,” she said. “Here’s what I’m going to do. He’s mine. I’ll do what I want with him. I’ll think of something.”

Hoffman just looked at her, questioning, Massy’s hair still gripped tight in his fist.

“Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

But Massy wasn’t.

She saw it for just the moment she needed to, that look in his eyes that said he didn’t know what was happening now, what would happen next, or how bad things might get, because this wasn’t in his rule book at all. That was fear. That was what he did to others. And that was what she wanted to inflict on him. The rest was academic.

Hoffman let go of Massy and shoved him aside. Massy found his voice after a few seconds. “You think you can threaten me, bitch? You think you can scare me?”

“I already have,” Bernie said. “Let’s see what happens next. You know how unpredictable women are.”

Hoffman opened the door to let her out, then locked the room behind them.

“Whatever you want, Bernie,” he said. “I’ll go along with it. But I really wish you’d let me cap the bastard and put it all behind you.”

“You were willing,” she said. “And that’s enough for me.”

Hoffman had had enough nightmares. She wasn’t going to add one more. If there was any dirty work to be done, she would do her own.

VNB MARRIED QUARTERS, FAMILIARIZATION TOUR, THREE DAYS LATER.

“So remind me, Boomer Lady, how many words ain’t we allowed to say now?”

Cole and Bernie stood at attention in the second rank of the Gears guard, watching the small crowd gather in the square—a tree-lined square, like the ones Jacinto used to have—to hear the Chairman say something meaningful to the visiting civilians from Pelruan. Cole wondered if he would ever get used to any duty that just involved standing around looking good.

“Refugees,” Bernie said. “If you say the R- word, I have to wash your mouth out with carbolic soap. We can call ourselves Jacinto’s remnant. Or survivors. But he really wants us to get used to being citizens of New Jacinto.”

“Man, I hate that coy shit. We’re refugees. We ran, baby. We found refuge. So what?”

“He thinks it makes the worthy citizens of Pelruan see us as charity cases rather than the masters who’ve come back to see how well they’ve looked after the place for us.”

“If I ever talk ’bout runnin’ for office, Bernie,” Cole said, “shoot me. Because I can’t be doin’ with all that semantics shit.”

“Come on, look earnest and wholesome, Cole Train.” Bernie shifted her weight slightly. She had all kinds of aches and pains these days, but she didn’t seem to be planning on taking things any easier. “The civvies are watching. Our beloved Chairman is about to address us.”

The best rooms in town—in VNB, anyway—were the married quarters on the western side of the base. Prescott was so keen to make the Pelruan folk feel united with the Jacinto folk that he’d invited more of them down to see the work being done. The buildings were the same style as the grand old apartment blocks in Jacinto, but if Prescott thought he was going to build a nice replica of the old place here on Vectes, he had a lot of sweat ahead. Cole found it weird to watch the guy shift from stirring battle speeches to Gears about exterminating grubs to being Mr. Nice and practically kissing babies. It wasn’t like the man needed votes. Nobody had voted for years. Folks were only just starting to talk about that election stuff again, so maybe he was getting his campaign started early.

“I’m sure you never imagined this day would come,” Prescott said, hands clasped behind his back. “But Vectes

—New Jacinto—is now the capital of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. From here, humanity will rebuild. From here, we will recover our strength and numbers, reclaim the mainland, and restore civilization. Your contribution—keeping this outpost going for so many years, and your willingness to welcome the survivors of Jacinto—has made the difference between extinction and a future for humankind.”

“Willingness,” Bernie muttered. “But not in their backyard …”

Gavriel and Berenz were in the crowd. They gave Cole a discreet wave. Well, they’d been willing; they’d kept the flag flying. Cole hoped they got whatever reward made people like that happy. They were probably just grateful to be told they could finally hand back the keys.

“So when we goin’ to stop callin’ Stranded Stranded?” Cole whispered. “They’re all different. I feel I oughta reflect that in my semantics.”

“Are you taking the piss?”

“I’m serious, baby. I need to know if we’re talking about gangsters, or bums, or homeless, or unlucky, or messed up in the head, or too afraid to go home, or what.” Cole liked Bernie too much to let her go on being bent out of shape every time that damn stupid S- word came up. “Or missin’ for ten years. Or just takin’ a long time returnin’ to base …”

Bernie didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. Eyes front, that was the drill. “Low blow,” she said.

“Shit, wasn’t meant to be, Boomer Lady.”

“I know, sweetheart. And I know you’re right, too.”

Baird was going to be a tougher nut to crack. He hadn’t been around the buoy a few times like Bernie. Cole decided he’d just have to learn the way she did, by hitting his head hard against the real world for a lot more years.

Cole tuned back in to the speech again. Damn, was the Chairman still boring the asses off those Pelruan people? He was. The man had stamina. Cole had to admire that.

“We still have a great deal of work to do bringing our people ashore,” Prescott went on. “We may ask a lot of you in the days to come. But your lives will improve, too. The first improvement you’ll see is to the security situation. You’ll no longer be subjected to attacks by Stranded. The criminal elements will be eliminated, and the rest have been offered a choice—to accept the rule of COG law or to leave.”

Man, he’d been doing so well up to then. Cole saw the fidgeting begin, and some folks looked down at their boots, because some of the audience really didn’t want to hear that Stranded could have a place at the table if they learned which fork to use. Cole also wondered just what Prescott meant by eliminated. He had to admit he was starting to squirm a little more every time the lawlessness thing got dragged out into conversation. Fighting grubs was something you didn’t have to debate about—they wanted every human dead, they didn’t have much else except that on their minds, and it was clearly a Gear’s job to stop them. No gray areas there, baby. But Prescott needed a police force now, not an army.

The Chairman finished his pep talk and the small crowd broke up. Cole and Bernie hung around, under orders to look reassuring and helpful with the other Gears until the civvies moved on. Prescott still didn’t want them having free run of the place, so maybe he hadn’t gone totally soft yet after all.

“Bernie, you’ve fought humans, right?” Cole said.

She laughed. “Yeah. Hate ’em. I want them off my planet.”

“I mean the Pendulum Wars. I never fought another human before. I kill grubs. You think I can cap a human if I ever need to?”

“Course you can, sweetheart.” She patted his back like he was a kid. “Once some bastard fires at you, experience takes over. You won’t care what the enemy looks like, and your forebrain won’t be making the decisions.” She looked at her Lancer. “I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with using a chainsaw on a human, but we used to use the old blade bayonets, and they’re pretty nasty in a different sort of way.”

Cole tried to imagine having this conversation with a local civilian. It would have been like trying to explain why he freaked out at the sight of that weird eel. People around him acted like two species now, those who got it when it came to the war with the grubs, and those who didn’t.

“Thanks, Boomer Lady.”

“Cole Train, you’ve never doubted yourself, ever. No reason to start doubting now.”

He almost asked her why she was worried about using the chainsaw on a human when she’d obviously done some pretty creative knife work on some guys, but he accepted that folks had limits that didn’t always make sense.

Three kids from the Pelruan party came over to stare at them. Cole had seen them around for a few days now. Bernie seemed to be her old self again since she’d caught her rapist, like she’d put all that shit to rest even without cutting his nuts off, and she squatted down to talk to the children like she hadn’t a care in the world. Damn, she was a pushover when it came to little kids.

“Hi, are you having fun?” she said. “I’m Bernie. This is Cole Train. He plays thrashball. What’s your name?”

Two of the kids just backed away and ran off. The little boy stood his ground. “Samuel,” he said, looking up at Cole. “Are you going to shoot us?”

“We only shoot monsters,” Cole said. That kid’s impression of Gears just didn’t seem healthy. “But only if they’re real ugly ones.”

Bernie frowned but kept it all quiet and soothing. “What makes you think we’ll shoot you, sweetheart? We’re here to look after everyone.”

“My mom says you will.”

“Really? I think she’s got that a bit wrong.”

“She says you’re all jumpy and you beat people up.”

Cole tried to imagine what the boy’s mom had actually said. Kids got the wrong end of the stick about detail, but they usually got the sentiment right, and that worried him. He squatted down next to Bernie—he often forgot how big he must have looked from a kid’s height—and tried to reassure the boy that Gears didn’t bite. Then a woman rushed up and grabbed Samuel like she was snatching him out of the path of a car.

“Let’s go, honey,” she said. “Don’t pester the Gears.”

“He’s no trouble at all.” Bernie stood up with her let’s-you-and-me-have-a-talk face on. “He thinks we shoot civilians, though. I was explaining that we don’t do that.”

“Okay, Sergeant.” The woman was backing away a step at a time “I don’t know what hellhole you people come from, but I don’t want any of you near my kids. You’re looking for a fight all the time. You’re angry at everything and everybody. You’re dangerous.”

“Ma’am, we—”

She stabbed a finger at Bernie. “I saw you assault a civilian. You hit an unarmed man with your rifle. Just stay away from us, okay?”

Bernie didn’t even try to explain, and just watched them go. The shock was written across her face.

“Shit,” she said after a long pause. “I terrify small children, and mothers think I’m a danger to society. Is that what I’ve become, Cole?”

“Bernie, she’s just a flake, okay? Forget it.”

“Yeah, I gave Massy a smack with the Lancer to get him down off the gate. If I think that’s normal, have I lost it?”

“Baby, listen to Doc Hayman. She said the whole damn city’s stressed as hell, not just us.” He thought of the eel that almost made him crap himself—just a damn ugly fish. “But these folks been livin’ in a nice little cocoon, so they’re naturally gonna think we’re all psychos.”

Bernie rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth. Shit, that had really upset her. She was scared of turning into an asshole like Massy and his thugs. Cole was almost starting to look back on Jacinto as a happy memory, a place where everyone understood that Gears had the kind of job that pushed them over the edge sometimes. It wasn’t like anyone was out of control—just messed up by a long war, nothing more than that.

“The day I was discharged from Two -Six RTI was like losing my family,” Bernie said at last. “Twenty-two years. My old man said he didn’t know who I was when I got home.”

“Shit, baby, I never knew you had an old man.”

“Farmer.” That was all she said. It explained some things but unexplained a lot of others. She glanced back over her shoulder at the civvies. “Stupid cow. She’ll come crying to us when she’s got Stranded swarming all over her.”

“Talking of which, what you gonna do with your pet asshole?”

“They don’t do well in captivity, do they?”

“You can’t hang on to him forever. Whatever the Chairman thinks, we ain’t got the spare food and manpower to keep folks locked up doing nothing for years.”

“Yeah, I realize that.”

“Not saying folks shouldn’t have justice, but it gets kinda complicated the longer you take over it.”

“If he was a grub, what would we do with him?”

“Slice and dice, baby. You wouldn’t have blinked.”

“The shitbag was right, then. We do have double standards, and we are soft.”

“See why I asked you about shootin’ human enemies?”

Bernie shrugged. “Then Massy’s business associates will want to avenge him. And so it escalates.”

“Yeah, grudges never rust.”

At least that made her laugh. Anyone who could laugh was still in one piece.

“Come on, we’ve got stevedore duty,” she said. “Plenty of ships still to be unloaded. Honest sweaty work.”

Cole looked back over his shoulder a couple of times as they walked away, and caught sight of two of the Pelruan women watching with mistrust all over their faces. So some of the locals thought Gears weren’t properly civilized like decent folk, and the Gears in turn thought the Stranded were a step outside the human race. Man, there was a league table of society set up already. Nobody could ever accuse humans of being slow to find someone new to look down on.

SMALL SHIPS’ JETTY, VNB, NEXT MORNING.

“I don’t give a damn if it’s unsporting,” Michaelson said. “First sign of trouble—open fire.”

The small inflatable boat puttered slowly toward the jetty, trailing a square of grubby white sheet on a long radio aerial. Dom could see one man at the tiller: twenty, twenty-five, rifle slung across his back. Marcus aimed down at the small RIB. The jetty was well above the water line, patrol boat level. “Yes, Captain

…”

“I detect doubt in your voice, Sergeant Fenix. When we have a quiet moment, allow me to stand you a drink and tell you some unsettling stories about my experience of piracy tactics.”

Marcus grunted. “You got it.”

Dom wouldn’t have put anything past the Stranded now, rubber boat or not. He made a show of sighting up on them, too. The man cut the outboard motor and let the boat drift onto the jetty wall, grabbing the bottom rung of the metal ladder to hold his position.

Michaelson looked down at him from the top. “So you want to talk,” he said. “I’m Captain Quentin Michaelson. You look familiar. Haven’t I sunk you somewhere before?”

The Stranded guy didn’t look amused. “Call me Ed. You’re holding a member of our management, and we’d like to talk terms.”

“What makes you think we’d want to?”

“We hear he’s not dead, and you haven’t shot me up yet.”

“Assuming we’re interested, what terms could you possibly offer us?”

“If you hand him over, we’ll stay clear of Vectes.” Ed cocked his head and seemed to be keeping an eye on Marcus. “And you stay clear of our territories.”

Dom expected Michaelson to give Ed the full COG speech on whose territories all the islands were, but he just ignored the comment. “Why should I negotiate with criminals who attack unarmed fishing vessels?”

“We haven’t touched your boats, man. Not for a while, anyway.”

“Very public-spirited. Perhaps another subsidiary of your Stranded enterprise sank the Harvest, then.”

“I tell you, we haven’t been near your fishermen.” Ed sounded wary. He was probably expecting Marcus to open fire. Dom was fascinated at his willingness to come right into the naval base, trusting the COG not to ambush him. “You lost one?”

“You know damn well we did.”

“I ain’t wasting my breath trying to convince you.”

“If I were to hand this gentleman back to you, instead of standing him in front of a firing squad as he deserves,” Michaelson said, “then I would want that done by your management team in person.”

“I’ll ask. I’m just the messenger boy.”

“And to show goodwill, I’d like the handover to be at your main location.”

“We’re not that stupid. Or trusting.”

“Then they can meet us here. Discuss how things are going to be from now on.”

“I think,” Ed said, “that they’ll want a neutral location. At a time of their choosing. You know how it is.”

Michaelson just folded his arms. “You’d better be able to put something substantial on the table and enforce it. Come back to me if and when you’ve got something to offer.”

Ed pushed off from the ladder and started the outboard. He left a lot faster than he’d come in, leaving a wide wake. Dom waited for Michaelson to tell everyone what he was really planning.

“Sounds like a nice simple deal.” Marcus lowered his rifle. “What’s the real one?”

“I imagine Ed is trying to work that out, too,” Michaelson said. “But this isn’t international diplomacy, Sergeant. We don’t have treaties with organized crime. And they are very organized. Let me show you something.”

He gestured to them to follow him and strode back toward the deepwater berths. It was a constant route march to move around VNB. Dom felt he spent most of his day walking around the place, and wondered if it would have been so hard to free up some vehicles and fuel to save time.

But I can walk anywhere without expecting the pavement to rip open and grubs to spew out of the hole. That’s got to be worth some boot leather.

He caught up with Marcus. “I always wondered what the navy did all those years when it wasn’t ferrying supplies. I’m starting to find out.”

“And Hoffman knows he’s doing this?”

“As long as Prescott knows.”

“Yeah,” Marcus said. “He always tells us everything. Never pulls need-to-know shit on us.”

“I think Michaelson’s making for Clement.”

“Shit. Armor off…”

Clement was a tight fit. A fully armored Gear wouldn’t even get down the hatch. They left their plates, weapons, and boots on the jetty—Marcus insisted on a guard for it all, even here—and squeezed into a whole new world that smelled of fuel and stale coffee. It wasn’t designed for really big men. Marcus kept scraping his shoulders on bulkhead instruments along the narrow passages, clusters of dials and tiny handwheels packed so tightly together that they looked almost comical. Dom tried to imagine locating the right control in a pitch-black boat after a lighting failure. That alone scared him enough to kill any thoughts of serving at sea. He’d take grubs any day, thanks.

“Welcome to the control center,” Michaelson said. The passage opened out onto a slightly less confusing space that spanned the beam of the boat. “Commander Garcia here is one of our last Pendulum War submariners, and this is our only boat, so we take very good care of both. Even so, we haven’t been able to maintain all the boat’s systems.”

Garcia was a lot younger than the grizzled old sea dog Dom expected to see, maybe forty or so, hunched over a small chart table. Not much older than me. Shit. How much combat experience has he got, then? Can’t be much. When Garcia unhunched, he didn’t manage to expand much in the space available.

“We like Corporal Baird,” Garcia said. “Very able engineer. Can we keep him? Trade you a few packs of coffee.”

“Tempting,” Marcus said. “But I have to decline.”

Michaelson tapped one of the gauges on the bulkhead, frowning. “Okay, here’s the plan I’ve put to Hoffman. We could afford to ignore a lot of piracy when the COG had a mainland presence. It wasn’t our problem so long as it didn’t affect us. Now we can’t—Vectes shipping’s going to be the single richest target they’ll have, and we’ll depend on safe seas until we can reclaim the continent. So now’s the time to give them a serious smacking and not just dick around picking off the occasional boat when we run into it.”

“What did you have in mind?” Marcus asked.

“Find their bases. Cream their vessels and eliminate their members. Sends out a message to the noncriminal Stranded, too.”

“And pirates are harder to pin down than you think,” Garcia said. “We don’t have the reach or the kit these days. But at least we can listen better now, thanks to Baird.”

Garcia fiddled with a control panel that Dom couldn’t even begin to recognize, and a very broken -up radio signal filled the small space. Dom had to concentrate hard to make out anything. But then the sounds started to fall into place, and he realized he was eavesdropping on intercepted radio chatter between pirate vessels. It was patchy, but it was better than nothing.

“We know roughly where some of them are, and who they are,” Garcia said. “Some of these guys have been around for years, like the gang Massy’s linked to. So now we know that they want him back, he’s finally going to be some use to decent society for once in his life. As bait.”

“I’m still not getting this,” Marcus said. “You lure a few gang bosses to a handover. You blow them up. And?”

“You knock out a chunk of their command,” Dom said. “It puts them off balance for a while.”

“And there’ll always be another asshole to take the job.”

“But there won’t be replacement vessels,” Michaelson said. “And knowing there’s an operational submarine around that can take them out will make them think twice about even going fishing.”

Marcus looked dubious. It was pretty clear that Michaelson had penciled in Delta to do some of the work. Dom wondered if Marcus was having a moral moment about all this, because even if he wouldn’t admit it, there was a lot of his father in him, especially the urge to do things right. Right could be very hard to define; lawful didn’t cover it. Dom recalled Hoffman’s barbed comments about Adam Fenix getting edgy over what to do with the civilian scientists in the raid on Aspho Point.

“I’m not used to fighting that kind of war,” Marcus said. “And it sounds like overkill. Torpedoes can sink a destroyer.”

“We don’t have many of those, so we won’t be wasting them until we can replace them,” Michaelson said.

“But don’t underestimate the deterrent value of a submarine.”

“Don’t you have to leave someone alive to tell the tale for a deterrent to work?”

“That, or surface in the right places occasionally.”

“I accept it’s a step beyond entrapment,” Garcia said. “But the pirates got used to that. They won’t be expecting this.”

Marcus nodded. Dom couldn’t tell if it was grudging approval. “Sneaky.”

“Submarine. Are you missing something here about the word submerged?”

“I meant double-crossing them over a deal.”

“If they were gray, scaly, and lived underground, would you do it?”

Marcus shrugged. “Sure as shit, sir.”

“Well, there you go,” Garcia said. “We’ve asked Hoffman for your squad for the surface element of the mission. So if you want to feel up front and honest when you kill them, you can.”

Marcus just looked at the chart on the table, nodded a few times, and then gazed around the control room as if he was memorizing the detail. Maybe he was wondering how anyone coped here if the lights failed. It was the kind of thing anyone trained to strip a weapon blindfolded would consider.

“If Hoffman tasks us,” Marcus said, “then we do our jobs.”

Back on the quay, Dom and Marcus put their armor on and stared at each other in silence for a moment.

“Okay, I’ll say it.” Dom sometimes got frustrated with him for not leaving that kind of high-level moral wrangling to his commanders. “The day you start worrying if we’re being fair to fucking pirates is the day I haul you off to Doc Hayman for a brain scan.”

“Fair?” Marcus started walking back to the barracks. Getting him to stand still and talk had always been hard. He always seemed to be on the run from conversations. “They’re assholes. They prey on people who’ve got nothing. I just feel … uneasy. That’s all.”

“Would you feel better if we declared formal war on them first?”

“Probably.”

“Talk to Bernie. Get yourself mad. Then declare your own war. I have. I’m fine with it.”

Marcus never talked about his time in prison. The Slab was a cesspit for the worst of the worst, and Dom had no doubt what those who were let loose when the Locust overran the area ended up doing. They didn’t all go into the army, or even stay in uniform. Maybe Marcus was trying not to let what he’d seen shape what he did as a Gear, a man with rules and standards. It was hard to tell. He didn’t say another word until they were almost at the barracks gate.

“I don’t give a shit about them as human beings,” Marcus said. “I just wonder what kind of society we’ll rebuild every time we bend our own rules.”

Dom decided to drop the subject. It was all what -ifs and exceptions, theoretical shit that might have been a great debate over a beer but didn’t help him deal with the here and now—his job, his task. And that was to protect the people he cared about, and the civilians who couldn’t protect themselves. That was the deal. He served the COG and defended the way of life he knew.

The pirate gangs had declared war on all that the moment they hit their first target. He was happy to play by their rules now.