We’ll end up chasing them forever. Too many places to hide. Not so many places for them to target, though. They’ve got to come to the settlements or ambush vehicles in transit. Time we lured these assholes into our own ambushes.
Marcus grunted, finger pressed to his ear. He was listening to the comms between Rossi and Control. “They’ve lost them,” he said. “Sam’s gone back to dismantle the device. She says she needs the materials.”
“Crazy bitch. Good luck civilizing her, Granny.”
“Waste not, want not, Blondie.”
“We beat grubs, man. We should have done the same with these assholes and bombed the shit out of them when they were all still in one place.”
“Amen,” Bernie murmured.
Marcus cut in. “I think we should all shut the fuck up.”
The dog led them along a zigzag path toward a patch of woodland. Baird caught up with Bernie as she came to a halt at the edge of a steep bank. A couple of meters below them, a stream glittered through a mesh of thin tree trunks jutting out from the slope, and Mac trotted back and forth along the edge, sniffing the air.
Bernie snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Seek, Mac. Did they cross here? Did they? Go on. Find ’em.”
The dog picked his way down the bank and paddled a few meters along the shallow bed, looking lost. Baird didn’t trust all this wilderness shit.
“You sure that mutt can hunt?” he said. “If all it takes to throw him off the scent is some water, he’s not a lot of use.”
“Blondie, who’s the survival expert around here?”
“Here we go again. The wild woman of the frigging woods.”
Marcus squatted on his heels to watch Mac casting around but said nothing. After a few moments, the dog paused, showed a lot of interest in a mud scrape on the opposite bank, and went charging up the slope.
“Game on,” Bernie said.
She set off after the dog, probably still buoyed up on the adrenaline of the explosion. Baird wondered how long she’d last.
“If he finds a Stranded camp, does he have the sense not to go charging in?”
“Probably not. Better keep up with him.”
It was hard going over ground knotted with tree roots and blocked by undergrowth, but the dog seemed to know where he was heading, and Bernie looked like she believed him. She kept pausing to check broken branches and other signs of recent foot traffic. Baird, radio tuned to the squad frequency, overtook her.
“Wait up,” Marcus said suddenly. “Listen.”
Baird stopped and Bernie passed him again. Someone had to keep an eye on the dog. Marcus gestured to Baird to listen in, and that meant switching to Control. Marcus was rarely without that damn earpiece, even off duty. Baird was pretty sure he slept with it in place most nights.
“Well, shit.” Marcus stared into the trees with that defocused look that said he was listening rather than looking. “It’s showtime.”
Baird switched channels. His ear was filled instantly with a welter of voice traffic straight out of the nightmare they thought they’d finally left behind on the mainland. Squads out on the roads were calling in explosions and ambushes. It was hard to pick out the detail. He found himself listening intently for Cole’s name in case he’d decided to help someone out and been caught up in this shit.
Mathieson’s voice was deceptively calm. “Say again, Ten-Kilo. How many down? Is Andresen T-one? How bad is he?” Then a more familiar voice cut in—Anya. She was back in Ops by the sound of it. “Ten-Kilo, KR unit Three-Three is inbound for casevac, estimate ten minutes. Stand by.”
Andresen. Baird didn’t hear what had warranted his T1 triage rating—serious abdominal wound, traumatic limb amputation, whatever—but he knew the sergeant well, and that somehow shocked him more than the whole Locust war. Baird had lost comrades every day to grub attacks and dealt with it. But this wasn’t the war, and they weren’t up against grubs who didn’t know how to be anything else but murdering assholes, and that made Baird spitting mad. They hadn’t survived years of grub attacks to get picked off by human vermin. He’d never felt this angry in his life. The urge to hit back almost choked him. But he was stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to kill.
Marcus just looked through him, unblinking. “Fenix to Control. Checking in. Need us to do anything?”
That gave CIC a breathing space to respond in their own time. Anya came on the link. “Marcus, we’ve got ten incidents ongoing, including one involving Gorasni troops. It looks like a coordinated campaign. If you need air support, you might have a wait on your hands.”
“No problem, Control. No contact here so far.”
“Hoffman says to remember to bring back some live prisoners.”
Marcus suddenly focused on Baird. “I’ll make sure we don’t forget that.” He paused. “Keep us posted on Andresen. Fenix out.”
Marcus liked Andresen. Bernie did, too. They both drank with him in the sergeants’ mess. Baird suddenly didn’t feel he was wasting time tracking a few assholes through the mud.
“Shit, I heard.” Bernie walked back toward them. She had Mac on a leash now, straining to hold him. “And that’s how a handful of arse-wipes can screw up a trained army. Come on. Mac’s busting to kill something.”
“I bet the Gorasni are just ecstatic to find their new home’s a battlefield,” Baird said. “That’ll take their mind off their missing frigate.”
“Cheapest form of warfare.” Marcus shook his head, that slow side-to-side gesture that was more disgust than anything. “Not a battlefield yet.”
“Yeah, tell that to Rory,” Bernie said, leaning back on the leash to slow the dog down. “If he survives.”
They resumed the trail in silence. Baird’s pulse was still thudding in his neck. It didn’t slow down to normal until Mac came to a sudden halt and stood with his ears pricked, staring intently past the trees at the slope of a rocky hillside. He never made a sound. Baird was expecting him to bark like a guard dog, but he just stared, and not even movement around him broke his concentration. The mutt was definitely trained to hunt with a handler.
Bernie crouched next to him. “What is it, fella? You got something?”
Marcus gave the dog a wide berth and stood on the other side of Baird with his binoculars in one hand. He didn’t seem comfortable around the animal. Baird squinted at the hillside and tried to imagine what the dog would see from here. Maybe he could smell something, or even hear it. The dog’s senses were much more acute than his own.
Then he saw it. It was just a fleeting moment, but he was certain; a wisp of smoke or a fragment of ash from the rocks, gone in a couple of seconds on the breeze. Mac’s nostrils twitched.
“Camp, maybe,” said Baird. He directed Marcus, trying not to blink and lose the point he’d focused on. “Elevation forty degrees, left of the bushes. See the deep shadow?”
Marcus panned with his field glasses. Bernie cradled her Lancer, catching her breath, and Baird had an unwanted thought about whether he’d have softened toward his mother if she’d lived to be old and gray.
No, she’d still be a bitch. And this isn’t guilt.
“Shit.” Marcus lowered his binoculars. “Caves. Just like old times.”
Caves were meant for entering. Baird wasn’t afraid of what he’d find inside. He’d already found real monsters under his bed way too many times to fear his own kind.
“Hey, flea-bag,” he said to Mac, looking for the best route up the hill. “That better not be rabbits in there.”
VECTES NAVAL BASE, NEW JACINTO.
Dom had always wondered if Cole had what it took to shoot another human being, but the last few months on Vectes had cleared up that question pretty fast.
Yeah, he could pull that trigger, all right.
They were officially off duty, but that didn’t mean a thing now. Medics moved in as KR-33 touched down on the parade ground, and all they carried out of the crew bay was an occupied body bag. Two of Rory Andresen’s squad walked to the inf
irmary under their own steam, faces covered with blast wounds. It had been an everyday scene in Jacinto, but it sure as shit shouldn’t have been one here, not now. They’d left all that behind.
Cole walked up and stood beside him, a half-cleaned section of Lancer chain in one hand and a time-frayed wire brush in the other. Dom didn’t meet his eyes.
“It’s Andresen,” Dom said. Just saying his name made it real. Up to that point, it had somehow been optional whether to believe the guy was really dead. “I just heard from Anya.”
“Aww, shit, man.” Cole shut his eyes tight for a moment. “Where’s his old lady?”
“Reid’s gone to find her. They come through fifteen years of grubs and he dies here. He dies now. I tell you, there’s no frigging sense in it.”
Sense. Yeah, that was it. There really had been some sense to fighting grubs, even though nobody knew what the hell the assholes had really wanted to achieve other than wipe out every human on Sera. Now Dom was back to the gray areas of the Pendulum Wars, where his enemy was someone whose motives he knew and shared. Humans should have known better. It was harder to take.
He checked his Lancer. “Should have gone with Marcus …”
“Yeah, maybe, but—”
Whoomp.
Cole’s voice was drowned out by a blast that made Dom drop instinctively. There was a split second of silence before the ball of smoke and flame shot up above the level of the naval base walls, and he found himself running toward the explosion. Everyone who didn’t have their hands full right then did the same thing. He couldn’t pick out the exact location, but it looked like the Gorasni camp beyond the perimeter walls.
If it was inside the walls, then the COG’s problems were a lot worse than anyone thought.
But it wasn’t. Cole and Dom reached the northwest gate in time to see a couple of open trucks heading up the main access path into the mass of Gorasni tents beyond the perimeter. The smoke was spiraling up from the far side of the camp. Even CIC seemed to be having trouble working out what had happened and who’d been hit. The Gorasni were chattering away in whatever they spoke, and CIC was trying to get sense out of them in Tyran. It wasn’t working out too well.
Dom’s instinct was the same as every Gear’s in that base—to deal with the situation, whether by helping the injured or securing the site. They strode into the camp, but two Gorasni guards moved in on them right away.
“We have everything under control,” one of them said in Tyran. He sounded as if he’d been trained to repeat the phrase but didn’t actually understand it. “Thank you.”
“That’s a bomb, baby.” Cole always wanted to help. He really did. “That don’t look like under control to me.”
“You want to do something?” the guard said. He understood Tyran just fine, then. “You do your job, Gear. Keep the roads free of bombs. You don’t know how? We show you. But later.”
“You’re not in Gorasnaya anymore,” Dom snapped. “There’s no goddamn border here.”
“We have people trained. Too many of you run around here—you just get in their way.” The guy’s tone wasn’t aggressive now. But he didn’t move, either. “Thank you.”
Cole caught Dom’s shoulders and turned him around to steer him back to the base. “Other things we can do. You heard the man.”
“Ungrateful assholes.” The guy was right in a way, but Dom wasn’t used to being told to run along. The frustration—shit, he wasn’t sure what it was, whether it was a reaction to Andresen or Maria or any one of a hundred other shitty things. He just knew he didn’t want to stand around and think. He pressed his earpiece. “Santiago to Control, you need me and Cole to do anything?”
Control was going to be overwhelmed right now and the last thing they’d need would be Gears asking for work to do. But there was a plan for emergencies, and bypassing that made more work for Ops. There was a long pause before Mathieson responded.
“You could give us a hand up here, Dom. Drive a radio for me.”
“On our way,” Dom said.
The main naval base building was part of a terrace of red-brick barracks four or five stories high, all winding stairs, varnished floorboards, and dark green paint. Dom and Cole struggled against a tide of Gears and emergency volunteers coming out of the main doors. Dom took the stairs to CIC two at a time, tidying his fatigues as he went, although nobody had given a shit about uniform standards for a damn long time. As soon as he walked into the room, the wall of sound hit him—radio chatter on the loudspeakers, Ops staff with phones to one ear and radio headsets held to the other. A group of the Vectes locals was maintaining a tote board on the wall to keep track of the various incidents and plotting them on a hand-drawn map. Mathieson swiveled in his chair and pointed Dom and Cole at a comms desk near Anya without breaking his conversation.
“Just as well Marcus kicked me off the hunting party,” she said, not making any sense. “It’s gone crazy out there. Dom—get on the radio and find Sigma Two. They haven’t called in. Cole—keep a line open to Pelruan. They haven’t had any incidents yet, but I need a rolling sitrep from them.”
Anya had a few scratches on her chin. She’d rolled up her sleeves, and when she reached out to pick up the phone, Dom could see a big bruise ripening just above her elbow.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yes, it went off some distance behind us.” She glanced past him at the tote board. “Only one of fifteen so far, though. Two Gorasni dead, four Gears, and some nasty injuries. I’m lucky.”
Ops was a lot harder than Dom expected. It was the waiting, the inability to grab a rifle and use all that spare adrenaline the way that nature intended. He found himself following a dozen one-sided conversations while he cycled through the frequencies trying to raise Sigma. The transport squadron was trying to rig a mine-clearance vehicle, construction workers up at the new housing site had found a suspicious patch of freshly dug soil, and the operating theater needed an electrician to fix some lights. The words serious abdominal wound leapt out at him and he made a conscious effort to ignore it.
Carlos.
Sometimes Dom didn’t think about his brother for days at a time, and then he’d be all he could think about, even seventeen years later. Time definitely didn’t heal. It just left longer gaps between the hurt. All you could do was fill your mind with the here and now, and not give the past a space to squeeze into until you felt up to dealing with it again.
Hoffman strode into CIC with Michaelson. Dom had his back to the door and was trying to read what one of the civvies was chalking on the tote board, but Hoffman’s voice, even at a whisper, always got his attention. The colonel was his old CO. Part of Dom’s brain was still tuned to him even now.
“Until we know what they’re using for explosives, we can’t break the supply chain.” That was Michaelson. “Are they stealing agricultural chemicals? Are they making them? Damn, Vic, they might even be shipping them in. Even with radar pickets, I can’t make the coast watertight.”
Hoffman grunted irritably. “Well, if Trescu’s so sure he can instruct us in the finer points of sucking goddamn eggs, let him run the patrols.”
“Well, if we’re talking about resupply from the sea—I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste time and fuel on rummage crews,” Michaelson said. “I’m not doing customs interdiction for contraband. Any vessel that isn’t one of ours—we sink it. They’ll get the message fast.”
“Here he comes,” Hoffman said. “Put on your grateful face, Quentin.”
Prescott walked in with Trescu. Dom watched discreetly. Trescu was used to being a head of state and being treated like one, even if that state was a few thousand people. He had that I-make-the-decisions-around-here air about him. Prescott seemed to find that funny. If Dom could see that, then Trescu sure as shit could too. The two men were having one of those icy arguments that were all clenched teeth and no raised voices, but that didn’t mean they cared about the grunts listening in. Dom felt like a kid, or the hired help, expected not to noti
ce what his elders and betters were saying. Prescott parked his ass on a vacant desk and sat gazing intently at the Gorasni leader with a concerned frown.
“My decision was not popular,” Trescu said. “Many of my people wanted to stay on the mainland and take their chances. I promised them they would be safer in your shadow, and now you make a liar of me. A hundred or so starving vermin, and you can’t get rid of them? So much for the mighty Coalition that brought the Independent Republics to their knees.”
“Because this isn’t a damn war,” Hoffman growled. “It’s terrorism in our front yard. We can’t burn them out or bomb them out because this is the only place we’ve got left. So we pick them off. You got a better idea? Last time I looked, you’d lost a whole frigate and didn’t know how it happened.”
Trescu—late thirties maybe, a real hard case with buzz-cut dark hair and a neat beard streaked with early gray—leaned close to Hoffman, not buddy-buddy but right in his face. Dom waited for the colonel to lose his shit with the guy. But all Hoffman did was clench his jaw as if Prescott had told him to keep it zipped no matter what happened.
“Colonel, you COG are soft. You are tolerant. You give amnesties.” Trescu somehow made it all sound like some kind of perversion. “And so you have a Stranded problem, despite holding several hundred potential hostages and informers within your very walls. But we are not soft. We solved our Stranded problem.” He paused a beat. “And our frigate—I shall find out what happened.”
Prescott joined in. “They aren’t hostages, Commander,” he said. “They accepted an amnesty. Mostly women, children, and older men.”
“Like I said. Soft.”
Hoffman was almost shaking. The old bastard had a temper, and Dom always expected him to have a stroke when he blew a gasket. Trescu pulled back slowly.