BY KAREN TRAVISS
STAR WARS: Republic Commando
Hard Contact
Triple Zero
True Colors
Order 66
Imperial Commando: 501st
STAR WARS: LEGACY OF THE FORCE
Bloodlines
Sacrifice
Revelation
STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS
STAR WARS: NO PRISONERS
GEARS OF WAR
Aspho Fields
Jacinto’s Remnant
Anvil Gate
WESS’HAR WARS
City of Pearl
Crossing the Line
The World Before
Matriarch
Ally
Judge
For Marcus Bevan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My sincere thanks go to Mike Capps, Rod Fergusson, and Cliff Bleszinski at Epic Games, Allfathers of the best damn universe ever; Epic’s artists, directors, and animators—the new Old Masters—for inspirational art; Dawn Woodring, protection dog trainer, for advice; and “Raven Maven” Wade Scrogham, USAF historian, for rotary aviation support.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Copyright
PROLOGUE
MAIN MESS BAR, VECTES NAVAL BASE, NEW JACINTO—CAPITAL OF THE COALITION OF ORDERED GOVERNMENTS. DATE: LAST WEEK OF BRUME, 14 A.E.
I’m not a people person. But you probably guessed that already. And no, I don’t want you to buy me a beer.
If you think there’s some nice guy inside me trying to get out if only someone would give me a chance—forget it. But then you’re dumb, like 99 percent of human beings. You can’t help it.
“Come on, Baird. Don’t be an antisocial dick all your life. Take a day off.” Her name’s Sam Byrne; all mouth, leather, and tattoos, and about my age—so she’s old enough to know better. She slams a brimming shot glass on the bar and shoves it at me. “Muller’s teaching us to play navy chess.”
“Oh, that’s so exciting. I think I just wet my pants.”
Sam waits a beat and then snatches the glass away. If it’s Dizzy’s moonshine, she’s doing me a favor. “Fuck you, then,” she says, and stalks off.
I need to cultivate that Marcus Fenix thing. He can sit at a bar on his own all night and no asshole goes near him. But then he’s Fenix. It’s not just the Embry Star war-hero vibe. It’s something else. It’s like the guy’s got warning buoys around him, even though nobody’s ever seen him really lose his shit with anything except grubs.
Even morons still have some survival instincts, I suppose.
Shit, I wish someone would turn off that frigging TV behind the bar. Listen to that asshole yakking on about the future and the chance to build something better. What fucking future? We haven’t got homes or running water for most of the refugees yet, but whoopee, we got a TV channel on air. Actually, it’s just radio with still shots. Everyone’s got a radio. There’s a few TVs in the communal areas, and the civvies here think that’s terrific. A boon. An improvement. Well, hoo-fucking-rah.
Dumb people are lucky. I envy them.
I mean it. Ignorance really is bliss. The problem with being in the top 1 percent—yeah, I am, does it make you squirm because I say it?—is that you understand just how badly fucked the world is. And it’s not getting any better. It’s just changing. But any shit looks better to most folk as long as it’s different.
Nice new media channel for the people. You think? Well, Chairman Prescott needs a way to feed all the dumb bastards his propaganda. And keep the frigging journos busy so they don’t actually do any real reporting, of course. And you think we should celebrate because the grubs are gone and we can start over? No, we just replaced the Locust with a new kind of two-legged vermin—Stranded crime gangs. We’ve bombed the world back to the last century and sunk our own damn city, so now we’ve got no manufacturing, no infrastructure, and no way to rebuild the rest of Sera.
But Prescott says it’s all going to be fine because we’ve got shitloads of fuel thanks to Gorasnaya. Flip that coin, though, and the other side is taking in four thousand ungrateful Indie bastards who were still technically at war with us until a couple of months ago.
Look, I could go on forever. But even a dumbass like you gets the idea by now. Right?
A big, heavy hand slaps me on the shoulder and grips it like a vise. It’s Cole. Most people would be more use as pet food, but Cole’s not one of them. I just don’t get why such a smart guy is so happy all the time.
“Baby, you want a Cole Train charm lesson?” He leans over and whispers loudly in my ear. “You’re never gonna get any action if you treat the ladies like that. Not even sheep ladies.”
“That was Sam.” The bitch always wants to arm-wrestle, out-drink you, or out-swear the boys. “Not ladies.”
“Come on. You know Bernie wants you to spawn plenty of blond surly know-all grandkids for her.”
Cole can get away with that. For some reason, he never pisses me off. “Yeah? She better place her bets on Dom, then.”
He sighs under his breath, for real, not his Cole Train act. “I think she’s gonna have a long wait.”
Dom’s a mess. I don’t expect a guy to shrug off having to blow his wife’s brains out, but he started mourning and making her into a saint ten years ago when she first went missing. If he didn’t move on then, what’s going to shift him now? Look, he’s not stupid. I stick with Delta Squad because they’ve all got opposable thumbs and IQs in the three-figure range. But that doesn’t mean they’re all sane.
So me and Cole sit at the bar and drink in silence. Sam’s enjoying her navy chess at full volume. I don’t want to spend too long looking in case they think I give a shit, but if I just turn a little I can see full shot glasses on the board instead of chessmen—moonshine for the white pieces, rum for the black ones. Oh, I get it. There—Muller’s taken one of Sam’s pieces, so he downs the shot in one. So how do they know what kind of piece it is?
See, this is what I mean about dumb people. That’s not chess. It’s checkers. But they’ll be too shit-faced to care by the time they’ve finished.
The mess doors open. Someone cheers. The barracking starts. “It’s a dog!”
Another smart-ass chimes in. “Don’t talk about Sergeant Mataki like that. The word’s bitch.”
That’s as far as the jeering goes. Bernie Mataki just gives them that look, like she thinks they’re cute little boys of no real importance, which always works better than Sam’s shot-slamming. Don’t think I’ve changed my views on letting women serve frontline—bad idea, bad, bad idea—but Bernie can shut the guys up. Maybe it’s because she’s old and eats cats. Maybe it’s her service record. And it just might be because everyone knows she cut off some guy’s balls. But she really does have a dog on a leash, a big, wild-looking thing with a wiry gray coat, thirty kilos at least.
“Isn’t he a beaut?” She rubs his ears and he looks up at her with big brown puppy eyes, just like frigging Hoffman. The whole bar stops to ooh and ahh like they’ve nev
er seen a dog before. “Meet Mac. He hunts Stranded. I’ve borrowed him for a while.”
“Does he do tricks?” Cole asks.
Bernie walks the mutt over to me. This thing’s head is level with her hip. It looks like a wolf that’s had a bad hair day. “Mac, this is Blondie. No humping his leg, okay? No, I’m talking to you, Baird.”
If I react I’ll only encourage her. “Does your pedigree asshole-hound know you eat pets, Granny?”
“Just cats. He’s fine with that. Aren’t you, fella?”
“Nice doggie,” Cole says. “You’re gonna save us a lot of time.”
“Come on. Let’s go walkies.” Bernie could put a saddle on that damn dog and ride it. I hope it’s okay around helicopters. “If we can’t flush out those Stranded bastards, let’s see what dogs can do. Time we found out where these tossers are holed up.”
“Can we call ’em gangs or somethin’, Boomer Lady?” Cole asks. “On account of most Stranded bein’ like Dizzy. Harmless. Nice, even.”
Navy chess doesn’t do a thing for me. But hunting assholes … now that’s a sport a guy can take some pride in. Yeah, Cole’s got a point. This is a whole new species of Stranded. Not the parasitic bum variety—this is organized crime, piracy, rape, murder. Don’t give me any of that bleeding-heart crap about how we’ve all got to stick together now that we’re trying to rebuild human civilization. There’s never been a better time than this to put out the trash.
“Okay, call ’em vermin,” I say. “And I vote that Mac gets to keep the chewy bits.”
Anyone outside the curfew zones with no business being there is fair game. Right?
Don’t look at me like that. You don’t know what it’s been like for the last fifteen years. I don’t regret a damn thing, except not doing some of it sooner. What are you—my frigging mother?
CHAPTER 1
COALITION OF ORDERED GOVERNMENTS
NAVAL BASE VECTES
NONCITIZEN INCIDENT LOG SUMMARY
THAW 1 TO BRUME 35, 14 A.E., INCLUSIVE.
Attacks on property: 35
Attacks on civilians: 20
Casualties, civilian: 15 injured, 6 dead.
Casualties, COG personnel: 18 injured, no fatalities.
Casualties, insurgents: 30 dead.
(Injury data unavailable. No wounded detained.)
VECTES NAVAL BASE, NAVY OF THE COALITION OF ORDERED GOVERNMENTS, NEW JACINTO: FIRST WEEK OF STORM, 15 A.E.
“Welcome to New Jacinto,” said Chairman Prescott. “And welcome to the protection of the Coalition of Ordered Governments. May this new year be a new start for us all.”
Hoffman had to hand it to Prescott; he could always manage to look as if whatever lie he was telling at the time was the holy truth. The two men stood on the jetty as the Gorasni container ship Paryk disembarked its human cargo, five hundred civilians from an independent republic that had still been officially at war with the Coalition until last month. They were part of the COG now, whether they liked it or not. Hoffman guessed that they didn’t.
“They don’t look in a party mood, Chairman,” Hoffman said.
A statesmanlike half-smile was nailed to Prescott’s face, probably more for the benefit of his local audience—a detachment of Gears, a medical team, some civilian representatives—than for the new arrivals.
“I hope it’s disorientation and seasickness rather than a lack of gratitude,” he said.
Hoffman eyed the procession, looking for potential troublemakers and wondering if any of the refugees spoke the language well enough to see the irony in the COG’s title. Governments? There was only one government left, a city-sized administration on a remote island a week’s sailing time from Tyrus. That was all that was left of a global civilization of billions after fifteen years of fighting the Locust.
But on a sunny day like this, not a typical Storm day at all, Vectes must have looked pretty good compared with the mainland. No grub had ever set foot here, and it showed. The Gorasni bastards should have been grateful. Safe haven and food in exchange for all that extra fuel they didn’t need? It was a good deal.
“Maybe they just hate our guts.” Hoffman tried to imagine the mind-set of a pipsqueak nation that ignored the Pendulum Wars cease-fire. That was some serious grudge-nursing. “It was their leader’s idea to join us. I’m betting he didn’t take a vote on it.”
“Let’s hope they think of it as a bring-a-bottle party.”
The Gorasni certainly weren’t arriving empty-handed to drain the COG’s limited resources. They were surrendering their imulsion supplies—an operational offshore drilling platform—in exchange for a refuge. In a world burned to a wasteland, fuel and food were the two assets that meant there’d be a tomorrow. Hoffman wasn’t crazy about the Indies and he was damned sure they weren’t crazy about him, but these were desperate times.
Can’t be too choosy about our neighbors. At least they’re not Stranded. They’re not killing us—yet.
A security detail of Gears lined the jetty, channeling the refugees to the reception team at an old storehouse that was built into the fortresslike walls. Hoffman glanced at the faces around him and wondered if any war could ever make you forget the one that preceded it. But the Vectes locals had never even seen a Locust. Their monsters were still the Indies, the old human enemy from an eighty-year war—the people landing on this jetty.
“Bastards.” An elderly man from the Pelruan town council wore a chestful of Pendulum War medals on his threadbare jacket, including the Allfathers’ Medal. No, he wasn’t about to forget. “Can’t forgive any of them. Least of all those who still aren’t sorry for what they did.”
Hoffman noted the campaign ribbons and chose his words carefully. It was hard to navigate that dividing line between mortal enemies one day and new allies the next. The name that made his bile rise wasn’t Gorasnaya, though, so he could look at these Indies with a certain distance.
Should I? I know what they did. I know what the old guy means. But they weren’t the only ones. We all did things we weren’t proud of.
“They’re Indies with plenty of fuel,” Hoffman said at last, conscious of Prescott eavesdropping. The man could look engrossed in something but that slight tilt of the head said he was taking in everything within earshot. “Nobody’s asking you to forgive. Just take their imulsion as war reparation.”
The old man stared at Hoffman as if he was an ignorant kid rather than a fellow vet.
“My comrades died in a Gorasni forced labor camp.” He tugged at his lapel so Hoffman could see a timeworn regimental pin with the trident badge of the Duke of Tollen’s Regiment. “The Indies can shove their fuel up their ass.”
“Mind my asking why you’ve come today?”
“Just wanted to see how they looked without a rifle in their hands,” said the old man. He was probably in his seventies, maybe only ten or fifteen years older than Hoffman, but the border with old age always moved a few years ahead with each birthday. “Everyone needs to look their monsters in the eye. Right?”
And all monsters needed to acknowledge their guilt before forgiveness could begin. Gorasnaya hadn’t even come close. Maybe that would never have been enough anyway.
“Right,” said Hoffman.
The veteran turned his back on the stream of newcomers filing along the quay and hobbled away. The Gorasni weren’t going to get a welcome parade from the townsfolk in the north of the island, that was for sure.
Prescott took one step back and bent his knees slightly to whisper to Hoffman. “Doesn’t bode well, Victor.”
“What did you expect?”
“It was a whole war ago. It’s history now.”
“Not here.” While most of the world fried, Vectes had waited without much to distract it. The island had been cut off from the rest of the COG when the Hammer of Dawn was deployed, although whether it thought itself lucky now was another matter. “It’s still yesterday for some of them.”
“And you?”
“I never served on the e
astern front,” Hoffman said. He had his bad memories like any other Gear, but they had nothing to do with Gorasnaya. “I don’t imagine some Indies have fond recollections of us, either.”
Prescott inhaled slowly, eyes still on the procession of Gorasni. “I won’t allow human society to rebuild ghettos, but let’s be prudent. Keep the refugees apart from the rest of the civilians until we’re absolutely sure that everyone’s used to the idea. Like the rehabilitated.”
“Is that what we’re calling them now?” Hoffman had now had a bellyful of euphemisms. “Let me strike the word Stranded from my operational vocabulary, then. I thought we were keeping the rehabilitated ones separate for opsec reasons so they didn’t tip off their unrehabilitated buddies about our patrols.”
If Hoffman’s irritable lack of deference irked Prescott, the man didn’t let it show. In fact, the slimeball smirked. “Who says a certain caution about the Gorasni refugees isn’t for operational security too?”
Refugees was an ironic term. Everyone on Vectes—except the native islanders—had fled from Old Jacinto only months earlier. Lines were drawn fast in this new post-Locust world. Hoffman glanced up the jetty to watch three Pelruan councilmen talking in a tight knot, one of them far too young to have served in the Pendulum Wars anyway. So were a lot of the Gorasni. That didn’t mean they hadn’t inherited opinions from those who weren’t.
Nobody’s ever seen more than a few months of peace. Any of us. How long does it take people to forget? Or do we never manage to?
“Trescu’s going to keep his people in line, and so will we,” Hoffman said at last. He didn’t like the look of a couple of the men disembarking, in particular the way their jackets hung as if draped over something bulky underneath. Gorasnaya might have been relaxed about arming civvies, but the COG wasn’t. They’d have to deal with that, diplomatically or not. “It’s all about keeping folks fed and busy.”