“Holy fuck,” said the man. “You nearly made me shit myself. You little buggers really don’t make any noise, do you?”
Bai didn’t yet have the language skills to tell the red-haired tattooed giant that he’d almost shit himself as well. He saluted. He didn’t know what else to do.
“Private Bai Tak, sah,” he said. “We Pesanga. Six Pesanga. You want help?”
“Bloody right we do, son. Come on. Come and meet the CO. I’m Pad, by the way. Private Salton.” He turned around as he led them down the slope and grinned, staring at Bai’s machete. “Is it true that once you draw your blade, you’re not allowed to sheath it again until you cut some bugger’s head off?”
Bai understood most of what Pad was saying, but putting an answer together in Tyran was a lot harder. He just did what everyone did when faced with a foreigner who seemed to be friendly. He grinned back.
“Damn, you love your work,” Pad said. “We’re going to get on just fine.”
CHAPTER 14
I can do business with Hoffman. He would not—could never—lie to me. He enjoys wielding the truth too much. I think he’s in love with its power to shock. And he knows that as long as he brandishes it, nobody will burden him with secrets he doesn’t want to keep.
(COMMANDER MIRAN TRESCU, JUSTIFYING HIS ALLIANCE WITH COLONEL VICTOR HOFFMAN TO DISGRUNTLED MEMBERS OF HIS COMMUNITY)
KR-80, TRACKING STRANDED FLEET WEST OF VECTES: PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.
“Okay, I’ll field this call if you’re all out of the office,” Gettner said. “But they didn’t mistake us for a SAR bird.”
Dom listened on the radio. The incoming voice was one he thought he’d heard before, and Marcus’s slow blink confirmed it. This was the guy he’d called from Steady Eddie.
“I’ll talk to him,” Marcus said. He took a breath and pressed his earpiece. “This is Sergeant Fenix. Remember me?”
“Hey, COG. Dropped by to strafe us? Or do we need to watch for submarines this time? You’re so versatile.”
“You need to watch for the things that sunk your cruiser. Who am I talking to?”
“Lyle Ollivar. Remember that guy you torpedoed after agreeing to a truce with us? I took over from him. They wanted someone less trusting in the position.”
“Okay, pissing contest over. You know what Lambent are?”
“We hear the name.”
“We lose ships to them. So do you. They’re the things that make the Locust crap their pants. You want to know how bad things could get?”
“Oh, we know.”
Dom looked at Baird for a moment. Did they know about the imulsion rig yet? If they did, did they understand what had actually happened? There was only so much they could glean from whatever got whispered and passed around between Stranded on the island, and they probably hadn’t cracked COG radio encryption yet. Baird just shrugged.
“We need to talk,” Marcus said. He gestured to Dom to get his attention and mouthed call Hoffman. “No bullshit. I’m willing to come to you.”
Ollivar paused. “Unarmed.”
“If you don’t count a cannoned-up Raven for insurance, yes.”
Dom gave Marcus an emphatic shake of the head just as Control responded. You must be crazy. Don’t do it. He moved to the back of the crew bay to get out of audio range. “Control, this is Santiago. I need to speak to Hoffman.”
Marcus carried on the negotiation. Dom thought it was a waste of time, but Marcus did things by the book—at first, anyway. He always gave assholes one chance. Maybe it was the right thing to do. For every bastard who killed Dom’s buddies, there were many more Stranded who were just pitiful losers, or unlucky like Dizzy, or decent folk like whoever had looked after Maria for years before the grubs got her.
I’ll never know who they were. They might even be on those boats down there.
Yeah. My wife was Stranded, too.
Dom couldn’t forget that. Today was one of the rough patches he plunged back into—less frequently now, but near-unbearable all the same. It was coming up to the anniversary of the day he’d first met Maria. There were more good days than bad now, but the bad ones still came back with a vengeance, grabbed him, and whispered: You lost them, all—kids, parents, wife, brother, friends. There’s only Marcus left.
Marcus was still waiting for a response from Ollivar, staring out of the Raven’s door. Hoffman came on the radio.
“What is it, Dom?”
“Sir, we’ve located a Stranded fleet west of the island, inbound. Marcus is talking to their leader.”
“They planning an assault?”
“If they are, Captain Michaelson can probably reduce it to driftwood. Maybe landing arms, maybe something else entirely.”
“Do you need backup?”
“Not yet.”
“Tell Marcus—no deals we can’t honor.”
“Got it, sir. Stand by. Santiago out.”
Gettner cut in. “I can’t circle here all day.”
“Give him a few minutes,” Marcus said. “If he’s up for it, can you land me?”
“You’re nuts.”
“Can you?”
“You can rope down to the car ferry on the edge of the convoy. I can approach that from its starboard side—less chance of being shot at.”
“If you’re roping down, so am I,” Dom said.
Marcus ignored him. “If it goes to rat shit, Major, bang out and get back to base.”
Screw that. Dom started laying out two rappel lines on the deck in front of his seat. He’s not going down there alone. Or unarmed. They never notice the knife. They’re too fixed on the fucking chainsaw to care about the knife.
“Okay, Sergeant, how and where are we going to do this?”
“Car ferry. Space to fast-rope down.”
“No need to tell you what happens if you live up to my expectations of you fascists and do anything dumb.”
Gettner looped the Raven around and came in lower than Dom thought she’d risk.
“Don’t hang about,” she said. “I don’t fancy ditching here when I run out of fuel.”
Barber checked Marcus’s rappel line and stood ready to give him an assist off the edge of the bay. Marcus’s attention was on what was underneath him, not behind, so Dom just exchanged nods with Barber and stepped into position to follow down. It was almost funny that there was no discussion needed. Marcus was doing something sacrificially risky, so Dom was going to ride shotgun, and Barber was going to enable that—again. Marcus could argue the toss about it later with Dom, after he didn’t get shot or taken hostage.
I’m still a commando. I can do this shit.
Their boots hit the ferry’s deck. Marcus crouched as the Raven lifted clear, looking faintly annoyed.
“You ever stop to think that Ollivar might object to two Gears when he thought he was dealing with one?”
“He can kiss my ass,” Dom said. He noted the welcoming committee of four armed Stranded around the landing area. “What are you going to say to him?”
“That he’s in the same shit as we are. See where we go from there.”
It took Ollivar ten fuel-wasting minutes to arrive. His powerboat—gun on the foredeck, very snazzy, a real drug baron’s gin palace—brought him alongside, and he boarded with the ease of an admiral on a ship inspection visit.
He didn’t look like a pirate, unless Dom counted the assault rifle. He was thirtyish and well groomed, like an ambitious middle manager on his day off doing a bit of adventure training. This was the chief of the quaintly named Lesser Islands Free Trade Association.
The fact that kill-crazy Trescu was responsible for the death of his predecessor probably didn’t matter much to a man who saw the COG and Gorasnaya as being one and the same.
Well, we say they are, too. What’s the guy to think?
“I really hate it when history repeats itself,” Ollivar said, apparently unworried by Dom’s unexpected arrival. “So why should I give you lying fucks the time of day?”
Marcus shru
gged. “We’re having problems with the Lambent, and you’re going to have them, too.”
“Ah, but we’re small and mobile, and we can even run to the mainland when we need to, but you’ve painted yourself into a corner on your little fortress island. Sitting ducks.”
Marcus didn’t react. He never did. He just had that look that said he was making a note of anything useful, a slow-motion nod. “So you accept that Lambent are taking out your boats, not us.”
“We fish too. We’ve found a couple.”
“Stalks as well?”
“The things that keep punching up through the ground? I hear they’re appearing all over the mainland now.”
“Okay,” Marcus said quietly. “So you think you can deal with this.”
“We can avoid it. That’s why we’re heading to Vectes, in case you thought we were mounting some armed landing. We’re getting our people out while we still can.”
“If this shit’s spreading, you’re going to run out of places to hide,” Marcus said.
Dom wasn’t sure if Marcus knew something he didn’t, or if he was doing something very un-Marcus—bluffing. He steeled himself to stand there like the dumb sidekick and not show any surprise. Ollivar stared Marcus out for a few seconds, but he was the first to blink—literally.
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
Marcus didn’t so much as twitch a muscle. “We’re monitoring the stalks that wrecked our rig. But if you think you can handle it on your own, fine—I’ll just thank you for getting your assholes off our case so we can work out how we stop these things.” He pressed his earpiece. “Fenix to KR Eight-Zero. Requesting pickup—we’re done here.”
Ollivar folded his arms, still doing the silent routine. Maybe that was the little tic that showed he wasn’t as relaxed about evading the Lambent as he claimed. Marcus hadn’t actually asked him to do anything; there was no reason for the I’m-not-playing body language. But then Marcus was just standing there with his arms at his sides, a little awkward, hands loosely clenched. Dom knew that was just because he didn’t know what to do with his hands when he wasn’t hugging his Lancer—but it might have come across to Ollivar as balling his fists for a fight. Marcus wasn’t always easy to read.
“Warn us when you’re ready to embark,” Marcus said. “So our navy knows you’re coming. You know how they are.”
“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t want to blow them all away for what they’re doing to your guys.”
“Love to,” Marcus said. “But I’ve got bigger problems than you. And you’ll all end up dead anyway.”
Gettner was now hovering overhead in a fierce downdraft. Barber lowered the sling on the winch.
“Shame about your rig,” Ollivar said. “If you’ve got any sense, you’ll fire up that navy of yours and get the hell off Vectes too.”
Dom thought about that all the way back to the naval base, arms folded and eyes shut so that nobody would start a conversation with him. He wasn’t sure he could face another upheaval. It had been bad enough running from Jacinto to Port Farrall and then to Vectes. There had to come a point where it was better to stand your ground and die rather than wandering the world scared shitless of what was around the next corner. He listened to Marcus talking to Hoffman on the radio, and got the impression that the colonel was digging in rather than thinking of evacuating.
What the hell else could he do with a whole city?
“Okay, Hoffman’s glad they’re going,” Marcus said, taking out his earpiece and scratching his ear. “We got something right. One less variable to factor in. Maybe they’ll be kind enough to leave us the rest of their explosives.”
“Were you acting?” Dom asked. “With Ollivar, I mean.”
Marcus just raised his shoulders a fraction. It wasn’t even a shrug. “I can’t act.”
“That’s probably why it convinced me.”
“What, that they’ll end up as dead as us?”
“Yeah.”
“He can chew on that for a while.” Marcus got up as the Raven flew low over the base perimeter. Half a dozen of the ancient bulldozers that had been taken out of mothballs to clear land for housing were parked in a line, and Gears were milling around them. “Looks like Hoffman really is digging in.”
Dom craned his neck. “What exactly are they doing? Did he say?”
“He just said that if it worked at Anvil Gate, it might work here.”
Hoffman never talked about Anvil Gate any more than Marcus or Dom talked about Aspho Fields. Dom assumed Hoffman’s reluctance was the same as his, born of a necessary thing that neither wanted to recall if they could avoid it. But the decorations and promotions tied to both events made damn sure nobody else ever forgot.
Hoffman had raised the specter himself, though. Maybe that meant he was dealing with his ghosts better than Dom was.
The old man was right. Some things were best faced head-on.
NEW EARTHWORKS, VECTES NAVAL BASE; THREE DAYS LATER.
Ollivar’s piss-pot fleet hadn’t come inshore yet, but neither had any stalks or polyps. And there hadn’t been an incident of any kind involving the gangs. Hoffman felt that the world was holding its breath for some reason.
He hoped that it was just giving him time to complete the fortifications before all hell broke loose. It would make a change to being run ragged by unfolding disasters on a daily basis, always two steps behind where he needed to be. The ditches and pits around the northern boundary of the camp were now extensive enough to give everyone a feeling of security and decisive action, however misplaced that might turn out to be.
What if the stalks come up inside the wire?
What if we can’t channel the polyps into kill zones?
What if … this is really the time that I fail?
At least Dizzy Wallin was happy. He climbed up into the cab of his derrick—Betty, he called it—and started the engine. The huge machine shook convulsively before rumbling into life. Hoffman stood at the top of the ramparts formed from the excavated soil and found himself almost eye to eye with the man.
Dizzy ran his hands over the steering wheel as if he was soothing it. “Mornin’, sweetie,” he said to the rig. “Did you have a restful night? You ready to do a little work for Dizzy? That’s my girl.” He rested his elbow on the cab door. “You gotta treat the ladies right, Colonel. Show you appreciate ’em.”
Hoffman was pretty sure that Dizzy really was just referring to the derrick, and not taking a poke at his guilty conscience. All the drivers recruited via Operation Lifeboat—Prescott’s coyly named project for conscripting Stranded with the promise of aid for their families—had this fixation with their vehicles. Maybe creating a crazy game was the only thing that made the job bearable; that, and drinking, which Dizzy did plenty of.
So what? He gets the job done. Poor bastard. How he kills his liver is his business.
“They’re all ill-tempered when they first wake up,” Hoffman said. “Best to give them a wide berth until they’ve had a coffee and put their lipstick on.”
Dizzy roared with laughter. “Ain’t that the truth. Look, how do you know this trap is gonna work, sir? Maybe them polyp things is just too dumb to follow a trail o’ crumbs.”
“They’ll come at us, Wallin. We’re the crumbs.” I’ve done this before. I’ve presented my throat to the enemy. And then, when he’s come within reach—I’ve killed him. “Then we make sure we get them where we want them. We lure them. We herd them. Damn it, we even bulldoze them with Betty. But we get them in a killing zone, and we finish them.”
“Betty ain’t gonna like that much, sir.”
“She’s a tough old bird. Most women are. Don’t you worry about her.”
But even the tough ones sometimes don’t make it.
The whole site came to life as drivers, engineers, and laborers showed up to get on with the digging and leveling. Staff Sergeant Parry, the most experienced engineer left in the corps, scrambled up a bank of earth with Royston Sharle to pore over a map.
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They knew what they were doing. They didn’t need Hoffman around. But he wanted to watch them for a while, just to be reassured that this wasn’t an insane waste of fuel and manpower when there was transport to maintain, houses to build, and crops to grow.
If they thought it was crazy, they’d tell him, one way or another. He was sure of that.
“Did you like digging holes in the garden as a boy, Victor?” Michaelson walked along the top of the hard-packed ramp. “I did. Buried my mother’s best porcelain teapot as pirate treasure once. She wasn’t delighted.”
“If you tell me that made you want to join the navy,” Hoffman said, “I might have to punch you.”
“Have you come clean with Prescott about how much fuel this is going to take?”
“He knows all the numbers. He also knows that if push comes to shove and we don’t use the fuel—the imulsion reserves won’t matter a damn.”
“So this is what you did at Anvil Gate.”
“It was. Except I didn’t dig any holes.”
“Somehow the words booby traps in the official reports didn’t quite give me the full picture.”
“I didn’t write it. COG Command didn’t like my version, for some reason.”
Yes, this was one of the ways that Hoffman had defended Anvil Gate. It was more the principle than the exact method, but it was age-old wisdom; if you feared you might be overrun and your outer defenses breached, you needed a way to make sure that the enemy regretted it. Entering your citadel had to mean death.
It was surprisingly easy to fight that way when the time came.
There was a territorial animal inside every human being—sometimes hardly hidden, sometimes so buried that even the individual didn’t know it was there—that would turn to blind savagery in defense of its home soil. Hoffman knew it was simply a matter of releasing it. Enemies pouring over your ramparts was a pretty good trigger.