It was late afternoon, all long shadows and a blue haze on the mountains, before the knot of UIR vehicles around the refinery showed signs of movement. Hoffman watched, noted, and calculated.
Evan slapped the part of the gun barrel he could reach like he was patting the neck of a racehorse.
“They say that an Indie guard post and a COG one faced each other across a border for ten years and didn’t so much as exchange a shot,” he said absently. “I forget where it was. I bet they did, too.”
Sander had been leaning against the wall. He pushed himself away and stretched his back. “Just going to put a call into Brigade Command about the Behemoth,” he said. “If we lose Shavad, they’ll need this route open one way or another.”
He turned toward the steel door that led down the stairs. As he got halfway across the gun floor, Hoffman heard a shout from the ramparts.
“What the hell’s that?” Sander said casually, looking out. “Oh, shit—”
The gun floor was engulfed instantly in a blinding yellow light. Hoffman heard the whoosh of a backdraft, two loud bangs like a car crash, and the air around him exploded. Something hit the back of his head; his mouth was filled with a searing pain, he could taste blood, and he suddenly felt the cold stone floor under his cheek. He couldn’t hear a thing. He couldn’t move. He was sure he was flailing his arms, trying to get up, but he wasn’t moving at all. Then the sound rushed back in and all he could hear was the garrison siren, panting screams, and a strange, gonglike sound. Everything else was just muffled underwater noises.
But he could see. Now he was looking up into Evan’s face, a mass of blood and pale gray dust. The gunner was leaning over him.
“Sir! Come on, get up! Fucking rocket—they’re behind us! They’re fucking well behind us!”
Someone pulled him upright. He felt like he was spinning on a fixed point, about to keel over again. He fell against Evan. As he looked around, trying to work out what the hell had happened, he saw the mess all around him—blast marks, blood, an armor backplate, black fabric. Someone had been hit.
“He’s dead,” Evan said. “Captain’s dead, sir. Come on. Out.”
Hoffman knew he was concussed because he kept wondering why nobody had fired the guns. Evan pushed him through the door and he nearly fell over Jarrold on the way down the stairs. He ended up sitting on the step, distantly aware of yelling and noise wafting in from the city.
“Hit my head,” he said. Sander’s gone. Shit, he’s gone. He’s dead. “What the hell was that?”
“Someone out on the rocks,” Jarrold said. “This side of the city. Some bastard put an RPG through the observation window. Shit, sir, it’s a miracle we got out alive.”
Hoffman found his mouth was working even though he didn’t feel it was connected to his brain. Rocket attack in confined space. Yeah. Why am I still alive?
“Are we still under attack?”
“Dunno, sir.”
Hoffman tried to press the button on his headset, but missed. It took him two stabs with his finger to activate his radio.
“This is Lieutenant Hoffman,” he said. “Byrne, Salton—get out there and find who fired that. Gunners—I need a crew to check the main guns, now. And somebody monitor the refinery, because I can’t see straight.”
It wasn’t even his voice. It was drill, and ten years of taking incoming fire, and the instinct that said if he didn’t get a grip of this then nobody else would. He knew he was hurt; he knew Sander was dead. He just needed the autopilot Hoffman to carry on while he tried to reconnect all the torn, loose, and terrified parts of himself.
Two things preoccupied him for the next few minutes, and neither was urgent, he knew.
One was that the glass of his watch was broken, and he couldn’t see the second hand. The other was that he had no idea what he was going to say to Ranald Sander’s pregnant widow.
CHAPTER 12
In order to preserve our existing stocks while we find a new source of imulsion, only vehicles, vessels, generators, and machinery capable of using alternative fuels will be operated until further notice. All nonessential travel and non-mains power use is now restricted to vehicles and devices rechargeable from the hydroelectric supply. This ban will be enforced under the terms of the Fortification Act. Please cooperate fully with requests from COG personnel.
(EMERGENCY ORDER FROM CHAIRMAN RICHARD PRESCOTT TO ALL VECTES INHABITANTS)
NEW JACINTO, VECTES THE MORNING AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF EMERALD SPAR: PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.
Bernie found it hard to tell what hit people hardest when they heard the news about the imulsion platform.
The mood around New Jacinto felt like a communal bereavement. Even Mac trotted along beside her with his head lowered. She walked through the construction sites and new dirt roads that now stretched a few kilometers out into the farmland to the north, and tried to work out if this was the point at which the Old Jacinto population, the folks who’d stoically endured unending grub attacks and privation for fifteen years, would finally snap.
It wasn’t about the fuel. They didn’t give a shit about shortages of things they’d never had much of anyway. It was about hope being dashed again and again. There were only so many times you could take something away from people, hand it back, and then snatch it away again. It broke them. It made them shut down.
Whatever the Lambent were, they were worse than the grubs. And they were out there somewhere, in forms and shapes that people couldn’t even begin to guess at.
I really thought it was over. I really thought the worst monsters we had to face from now on were going to be human.
“Hey, dog-lady!” The shout made her turn. It was the Gorasni sailor called Yanik who seemed to have struck up a rapport with Baird. Friendship was too strong a word. “The shit gets deeper, yes?”
“I’m really sorry about your mates on the rig,” she said carefully. It wasn’t the time to mention fuel shortages. “Poor bastards.”
“So what use are we to you now? No fancy frigate, no imulsion, and your doctor thinks we are all murdering scum. The old Pelruan soldiers cross the road to avoid us. I think our wedding is over.”
“Honeymoon,” Bernie said automatically. “The phrase is the honeymoon’s over.”
The conversation had turned very awkward very fast. Mac must have sensed her shift of mood, because he stood growling at the back of his throat in his let-me-kill-him pose—ears forward, lip curled back, eyes fixed on the threat. Bernie held her hand against her leg and snapped her fingers to distract him.
“You think it is?” Yanik asked. He didn’t seem bothered by the growling at all, or maybe he had a lot of faith in her ability to control Mac. “Because Trescu is now in trouble, I think. And that is not good for anybody.”
Nothing was clear-cut for Bernie these days. One thing she’d accepted as an inarguable fact since childhood was that the Indies were the eternal enemy. The Pendulum Wars had become so embedded in every state’s culture that she’d been a Gear for a couple of years before she even started to ask herself why any South Islander—conquered and colonized nations, not willing volunteers—would see the COG as the natural good guys. But the UIR were a bunch of empire-building shits, too. Who could you trust? Well, she thought that she couldn’t trust the Stranded, either, but then Dizzy Wallin showed up and took that certainty away from her as well.
At least I know the dog isn’t cooking up a scheme. That’s something.
“I don’t know what Prescott thinks,” she said. “But we’re all in the same shit together. And we’re probably better off having you here than not having you, imulsion or no imulsion.”
Yanik clapped her on the shoulder and nodded at the two rifles—one Lancer, one Longshot—slung over her shoulder. Mac rumbled a warning again. “Good. I know I get no bullshit from you. You know how to deal with garayaz.”
He gave her a finger-to-brow salute and walked on through the construction site toward the naval base gates. Mac watched him for a few moments
as if he was debating whether to go and sink his fangs in his face after all, just to teach him not to touch his pack leader.
“Come on, Mac,” Bernie said. “Just because we’ve got monsters, it doesn’t mean the Stranded have taken the day off. Seek!”
Bernie wondered if Yanik thought she was a reliable guide to COG attitudes because of Hoffman, that she knew more of what was going on than the rest of the Gears. They didn’t miss a damned thing, these people. But that was what came of living in a big village. Everybody knew your business sooner or later. A close community had its downside.
At least she had the time and the reason now to take Mac out tracking on foot. As Baird put it, “asshole hunting” was best done quietly and without a vehicle anyway. As soon as they reached the exclusion zone roadblock, Mac bounded ahead. The Gear on the checkpoint paused to chat to her.
“What the hell else is out there?” he said. “How long do you think we’ve got before that stalk thing gets here?”
“No idea,” she said, realizing that she felt increasingly pissed off at being out of the loop. “No bastard tells me anything.”
Mac led her through the woods for a couple of hours, and if there hadn’t been that growing list of crises jostling for attention at the back of her mind, she would have been as near to contented as she’d been for a long time. It was even quieter than usual. Most of the Ravens were grounded today—at least Baird kept her informed, even if nobody else bothered—and she couldn’t even hear the occasional grinding sounds of Packhorses in the distance.
Well, Pelruan’s okay. They learned to live without imulsion years ago.
And I suppose it means that the navy’s buggered. Can’t run a warship on vegetable oil.
Mac came cantering back to her with his follow-me face on, tail thrashing. She put her finger to her lips.
“Sssh. Good boy. Show me.”
And Mac did exactly that. He trotted off, head down, and led her through undergrowth to a tree-covered, barely visible path crushed by recent and repeated foot traffic. The battered vegetation and the various stages of wilting told her that the route had been used over the course of a few days.
Still worth staking out, then.
Bernie rubbed Mac’s head and gave him a snack of dried rabbit meat as a reward before finding a ledge further up a nearby bank to give her a better view of anyone moving along the path. Making a sniper hide was easy out here. She just eased herself into the bushes, made the ground comfortable with her jacket, and settled down prone with the Longshot propped on its bipod.
She could wait for days if she had to, but she didn’t expect it to take that long to get some trade. It was only a hundred meters to the path; a Longshot was overkill for that range. This wasn’t going to be the old Pendulum War days when she’d lay up for a week in a scrape to finally drop a target a thousand meters away. Mac flopped down beside her and rested his chin on his paws, occasionally looking up at her as if he was waiting for a sitrep.
It’s going to be hard to hand that dog back to Will. It really is.
Mac just happened to be the one dog out of all Will Berenz’s animals who took a shine to her. He accepted her as his new pack leader and he did whatever she asked, sometimes working out what she wanted even when she forgot his special commands. She found herself rehearsing how she would ask Berenz what she would have to barter to keep him.
It was a few hours before she got the first indication that someone was coming. Mac, head still on his paws, pricked up his ears. She put her hand on his back to keep him down. Eventually she heard what the dog must have reacted to; the slow swishing sound of someone picking their way carefully through grass and bushes. It took a few moments of scoping up and down the path before she saw her target flash across her optics. At that moment, another Bernie took over.
She’d developed her own concentration technique during sniper training. She imagined what her target would go on to do next if she didn’t take him—or her—out with one shot. It always worked.
When she settled on the movement, it turned out to be a man of about forty with a rifle across his back, carrying a box with rope handles. He kept shifting it—holding it in both arms one moment, pausing to switch to the handles the next—and that told her it was heavy, possibly ammo. He couldn’t move fast and had to wade through the vegetation.
Swish … swish … swish …
Okay … is he alone?
If she’d interrupted a supply column, she couldn’t shoot and run from this position, so if there were others coming she’d have to leave it and just trail them at a safe distance to locate their camp. This wasn’t a great place to start a firefight.
I ought to let him pass and track them anyway.
The man’s head was in her crosswires now. She had to make the call. This was a decision she’d made maybe hundreds of times in her service career, but it was still something of a gamble every time. And she very rarely thought about her target in human terms, but today—she did.
Okay. End it now. He’ll never know he’s dead. Not hours of bleeding out. Not running for his life. Just gone, just like that.
Bernie exhaled, held that breath, and squeezed the trigger. Crack. She saw the spray of blood as the man dropped instantly. Relief flooded her gut. Mac flinched at the sudden noise but stayed put.
“Good boy,” she whispered. “You’re the best spotter I ever had.”
She got to a kneeling position and waited a few moments to be sure there was nobody right behind the guy. Then Mac jumped up and stood staring down the slope to the left, hyperalert. He was a great spotter, all right; there was someone else out there. And they couldn’t have failed to hear that shot.
Shit. Bang out, engage, or lie low?
Bernie reloaded the Longshot just in case, then took up the Lancer. Two younger men were moving at a crouch along the path, pausing to check around them every few meters. One had a handgun and the other a hunting rifle. They moved right up to within a few meters of the other man’s body, and Bernie braced for the reaction when they finally fell over him. They’d freeze. They’d look. And that was the window she had to drop both of them.
Now they were almost in front of her. They still hadn’t spotted her. They still hadn’t found the body, either, but there was no way they could miss it if they carried on. She exhaled slowly.
Wait. Wait.
But something subconscious took the decision, not the sniper part of her brain at all. Them or me. Simple. Bernie opened up with the Lancer from the cover of the bushes and put five or six short bursts through the two men at chest level. Then she hunched down as flat on her knees as she could, waiting again, listening to crows squawking high in the canopy, wondering if a small army was now heading her way.
But nothing came. Eventually she got up, legs shaking, searched the bodies—definitely dead, no awkward coup de grâce needed—and took their weapons.
The box was full of ammo, but it was too heavy to carry with all the extra firearms. She dragged it into a well-hidden spot she could find again for recovery later. Every round that she could scavenge counted.
That’s drill for you. That’s years on the clock. I evaluate the risks, take what’s useful, cache the ammo. But I never used to think about the who and the why of dead men.
“Home, Mac.” She could hear her own voice shaking and made an effort to steady it before she pressed her earpiece. “Mataki to Control—enemy contact in grid. Charlie Seven, three hostiles, all dead. I’m on my way back in.”
Mathieson responded. “Roger that, Mataki. You just doing a little opportunistic hunting?”
“You could say that.”
“Byrne says she can swing by with the bike and RV with you.”
What am I, the charity case now? “I’ve got the dog with me.”
“Can he ride a bike?”
Mac looked up at her with sad brown eyes: Don’t do that to me, Ma. “It’s okay, Control, I’m making my way to the main road. I’ll be a couple of hours at least.”
br /> “Leave your channel open in case we need to locate you. Everyone’s jumpy at the moment. Don’t want any friendly fire on my watch.”
Bernie didn’t think any Gear had reached that level of jumpy on Vectes. “Got it, Control. Tell everyone not to open fire on the harmless old bag lady and her mongrel. Mataki out.”
Bernie picked her way through the woods, putting her trust in Mac’s ears and nose. Yes, you really could trust a dog. Mac would go all out to defend his pack—her—and it probably never crossed his mind that a human might not put everything on the line for him. She decided to spoil him rotten when they got back to base. He could sleep on her bed and eat her dinner, and maybe Baird’s, too. The dog deserved it.
And I shot those guys.
The two extra rifles weighed heavily on her. She longed for a hot bath and a longer sleep. At least there was plenty of water and electricity thanks to the river, even if the COG was now reduced to running vehicles on cooking oil.
What was the point of capping them?
I mean, beyond orders, why? They’re a minor irritation compared to what’s waiting out there. Did I do it for Rory Andresen? For me? What?
Mac stopped and waited for her to catch up, tongue lolling. He seemed relaxed. As long as he stayed like that, she was sure she wasn’t about to run into any more Stranded. But she kept her Lancer powered up and a round chambered in her Longshot, just in case.
I don’t know how many people I’ve killed in my time. I actually can’t count them. And that’s never bothered me until now.
Bernie gave up trying to work out why—not guilt, not pity, nothing obvious like that—and wondered if it was just some primal realization that she was helping the world run out of humans, even if they were the worst specimens of the species.
“Hey, look—road,” she said. They’d come out of the woodland on a slope above the main route to Pelruan. Mac stared up into her face, all unquestioning devotion. “You’re a great guide dog, too. Who’s a clever boy? Yeah, you are. Come on. Dinner.”