That was about the size of it. Nobody mentioned polyps. They had suddenly become a temporary problem compared to what the stalks could do in the longer term. Polyps could be detonated. The toxin—or whatever it was—couldn’t.
Hoffman took a breath. “We still can’t tell if there’s a limit to how far these things can extend beyond the fissures. The gamble is how long we wait before we start relocating people.”
“All I’m seeing,” Prescott said, still not meeting Hoffman’s eyes, “is that there’s a fissure running more or less east-west and cutting off Pelruan from the rest of Vectes. Are we going to wake up to a stalk hedge across the north of the island?”
“We have an evacuation plan in place, Chairman. I don’t want to implement it until we have to. We’ve got some serious work to do before we shift three or four thousand people down here.”
“Is your Hammer of Dawn satellite network still working?” Trescu asked. “All of it, I mean.”
Answering a question like that from a UIR officer would once have been unthinkable. Ex-UIR, Hoffman reminded himself. He’s one of us now.
“We had a hell of a job even hitting that leviathan with it,” Hoffman said. “The sats are starting to fail. And we can’t incinerate stalks every time they pop up.”
“I wasn’t thinking of its destructive capacity.” Trescu got up and walked over to the chart as if Prescott wasn’t even there. “Can it relay images? I understood it could.”
Prescott didn’t move out of his way. “Oh, did you?”
“That’s the weather sat system,” Michaelson said. “It’s almost inoperable. The long-range comms network will go down next.”
“If you could acquire images from low orbit, you wouldn’t need your Ravens to fly reconnaissance.” Trescu took his knife from his belt, then stepped aside to open the sash window. He started sharpening his pencil, sending shavings floating away on the breeze. “But I imagine you’ve already considered that.”
Hoffman hadn’t, because the weather sats weren’t that good to start with. The resolution was fine for big weather systems. Anything as small as a stalk on the ground was beyond them. “We’ll look into it,” he said.
Trescu inspected the tip of his pencil and sat down again. “When do you plan to start rationing?”
“Fuel or food?” Michaelson asked.
“Either. Both.”
Prescott was tossing a pin in his palm while he studied the map. Then he looked Hoffman in the eye for the first time since he’d walked in, and pressed the pin slowly into the board with his thumb.
“Food’s effectively controlled by central distribution, anyway,” he said. “People don’t have grocery stores to plunder. We’re old hands at calculating how many calories any given human needs to survive, aren’t we, Colonel?”
“We’re pretty good at stretching imulsion supplies, too, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never run out.”
“I’ve got the latest minimum figures, if anyone’s interested.” Michaelson opened his notebook. “The chief engineer’s drawn up his best estimate of how much of each fuel we need to set aside to guarantee getting the fleet back to the mainland.”
Trescu tilted his head. “A one-way trip.”
“Yes. Using the minimum number of hulls required to move the existing population. Not cruise-level comfort, and no margin for error. This is the last-resort scenario.”
The window was still open. Hoffman could hear the puttering sound of a distant outboard and the rhythmic whoosh and thud of waves hitting the granite cliff beneath the naval base. There were no Centaurs rumbling along the roads, no distant pounding of artillery shells, no city noises at all. This time, though, the quietness wasn’t blissfully peaceful, but a reminder of how impossibly distant from the mainland this island was.
“We always planned to resettle the mainland one day,” Prescott said. “Let’s not paint this as the start of a panicky retreat, shall we? The intention to return has been public from day one.” He gathered up the images and put them in a battered folder. “By the way, I want squads to gather samples from each stalk site, especially if there’s anything unusual.”
“Twenty-meter-tall instant trees and killer crabs not unusual enough, Chairman?” Michaelson said.
“I mean anything that shows change.” Prescott flapped one hand vaguely. It wasn’t a gesture he used often. “Different features on the stalks. Other life-forms that are affected. We were getting quite a Lambent menagerie trawled up in the fishing nets, remember. Now, any other business?”
“Did we decide anything?” Trescu asked irritably.
“Very well, I’ll see you all later.”
Prescott swept out. As he opened the door, Hoffman caught sight of his personal protection Gears—Rivera and Lowe—waiting outside. They vanished down the stairs with him. What was it Baird called them? The Onyx Guard rejects. It was acidly cruel, as Baird usually was, but they did behave more like the security elite these days then regular Gears. The Onyx Guard was long gone, though like so many other units.
Trescu sat staring at the open door for a few moments.
“What is he afraid of?” he asked.
It was a good question. Hoffman got up to leave. “Never seen him afraid of anything. Not even when he was face-to-face with a grub. In any other man, that’d make me admire him.”
“That man is afraid.” Trescu stood up and pointed in the direction of the stairs with the pencil. “Can’t you see it?”
“We’re all investing in brown underwear now, Miran,” Michaelson said. Miran? So they were that chummy. “Maybe the Chairman’s finally got the picture too.”
Hoffman jumped to one conclusion. It was about the disc. Trescu had some kind of radar for detecting weakness in others, much like Prescott’s, and Hoffman was inclined to trust it. If Trescu said the man was rattled, then maybe Hoffman was getting too close to something.
He almost—almost—started telling Trescu about the disc. Old habit from another war shut him up before he parted his lips.
“I’m going to crunch some fuel numbers with Royston,” he said, and left Trescu with Michaelson.
GORASNI CAMP, NEW JACINTO: 15 A.E.
Trescu paused on the edge of the camp and scanned the rows of tents.
It was just as well that the warm season was coming, and Vectes had a mild climate anyway. At least he didn’t have to worry about losing more people to hypothermia like last winter. But that was little comfort when he considered that he could take in what was left of the entire Gorasnayan nation with one slow glance across a refugee camp.
This was all they had: tents, the possessions they could carry, and the few animals and vehicles they could load onto ships for the voyage. They’d arrived on Vectes with an imulsion platform still operating out at sea, but now they didn’t even have that. They were … stranded. The word alone almost choked him.
As in marooned. Not as in filthy savages. Never that.
Irony was inventively sadistic. The Gorasni now had less to their names than those gangs of Stranded vermin. Trescu’s instinct for survival—a communal thing, not his individual welfare—insisted he never stop thinking about how far Gorasnaya had fallen in the world order of Sera since his great-grandfather’s day. It was all that kept him from going under.
We were an empire. This should never have happened.
He walked on. He made a point of having lunch with his wife and son every day, however brief that meal might be. Three rows into the tent village, new wooden huts had already sprung up to replace those burned down when the polyps had swarmed through the naval base. A couple of men—Jorgi and Emanu—were nailing oilcloth onto the roof of one of the huts and paused to acknowledge him. A small tabby cat lay curled in the doorway, basking in the sun.
I know my entire nation by name. Every last man, woman, and child. Even that damn cat. That’s something only a dying people can manage.
“How’s it going, sir?” Jorgi called. “We heard the Raven pilots on the radio. The stalks are
poisoning more farmland.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much yet,” Trescu called back. It was hard to keep anything quiet in a community this size and he’d given up trying. He wasn’t sure he even wanted any secrets these days, and he didn’t care if Hoffman knew his comms were monitored. He knew Hoffman monitored his. “Chairman Prescott has a map on his wall with pins stuck in it. So everything is under control, thanks to the might of the COG’s little pins.”
“Shouldn’t we be thinking about our own evacuation plan?”
“The stalks are a long way from here. And where do you plan to run? Vectes is still safer than the mainland.”
“We won’t have enough fuel to leave.”
“I promised the COG that we would join them if they protected us,” Trescu said. And I should be planning to save my own people, not drowning hand-in-hand with the COG. “Until they break their word, that’s the way it stays.” He looked down at the cat. “And you, Sosca—stay clear of Sergeant Mataki. She’s on the prowl for fur linings.”
Trescu continued his walk through the camp, taking the long route home so that he was seen. It mattered. It was how he maintained command. There were many here who thought he was a traitor for agreeing a formal peace with the old enemy, let alone joining the COG and allowing them access to the imulsion—men like Ianku Nareci.
Just muttering. Just idle noise.
None of them had made a move against him; none of them had the balls to dare. He was a Trescu, for God’s sake. His father had defeated superior COG forces at Branascu, and his grandfather had driven them back from the border. He had pedigree. Gorasnaya had never signed the surrender because it had never been defeated, however weak it had become over the centuries, and that was because men of Trescu lineage had been in command.
I handed over our fuel and our future to Prescott and Hoffman. But they’re not the enemy. They’re not the ones killing us now.
When he reached his own tent—nothing fancy, nothing better than his people had—he could see that Ilina had company. Stefan Gradin, a man at a loose end now that his imulsion platform had been destroyed, and Teodor Marisc— Trescu’s senior warrant officer, just Teo to just about everyone—were sitting outside passing a smoke back and forth between them. They got up slowly as if they were stiff from sitting down too long.
“Your missus booted us out, Commander,” Teo said. “We have to smoke outside now, she says.”
“Good for her.” Trescu took the roll-up out of Teo’s hand and ground it under his heel. “Filthy habit. And a dangerous one in a flammable environment. Remind me to ban it. Come on, let’s eat.”
Ilina gave him a wink as he ducked into a tent fragrant with the aroma of lamb and garlic. It was amazing what a smart woman could cook on a camping stove. Piotr, ten years old and already a good shot, was cleaning his rifle in the corner with a frown of intense concentration.
“So is this a command meeting or lunch?” Ilina asked pointedly. Trescu walked up behind her and kissed the top of her head. “Because lunch gets you fed and a meeting doesn’t. And don’t try sweet-talking me.”
“I wouldn’t dare, beloved. Can the boys stay? They’ve been waiting to see me. Hungry work, waiting.”
“Okay. But you’ll have to fill yourselves up on bread. I only made enough for three servings.”
“They can have mine,” Piotr said. “I don’t mind.”
“No, you’ve got a lot of growing to do.” Trescu pulled a chair back from the table and motioned to his son to sit down. The meeting would take place with the boy there, joining in if he had something to say, not conducted over his head as if he were incapable of understanding what faced his people. It was essential that he learned what it took to hold a nation together. The duty might well fall to him one day. “So eat everything your mother puts in front of you. Understand?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Good.” Trescu reached for the bread basket and tossed a couple of knot-shaped rolls to Teo and Stefan. “Now, what’s so important that it can’t wait until after lunch?”
“Weird shit, Commander,” Stefan said, using the Tyran phrase. “We were testing the engines in Amirale Enka and we picked up a stray transmission. It broke in on the old maritime control frequency.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. It was a databurst. Like satellite noise, you know?”
“Not a scrambled COG channel?”
“I know what their scrambled channels sound like. This wasn’t it. And they’re not bothering to encrypt now anyway.”
Trescu’s first thought was that Hoffman was testing the Hammer of Dawn uplink. He could simply ask the man, of course, and he was pretty sure he’d get a straight answer.
Well, they did admit the Hammer net was failing.
Perhaps he thinks the Hammer generally is too touchy a subject. At least that means he doesn’t want to alienate us.
“Dad, are they going to bomb us again?” Piotr asked.
History was a live beast for Gorasni. Piotr hadn’t even been born when the COG had launched the Hammer of Dawn strike, let alone the Pendulum Wars. Ilina gave Trescu a weary look, passed around the bowl of lamb casserole, and said nothing. He knew she disapproved. She didn’t want her son taught to hate strangers. He had to find a good reason of his own, she said.
I don’t want him to have one. Because then it’ll be too late. And maybe the COG won’t kill us deliberately. Maybe they’ll just make another lethal mistake. I have to be able to trust their competence.
“Don’t worry, they don’t have any more bombs,” Trescu said. “Only the Hammer. And if they used it on us…” He looked at Ilina. “It would be out of carelessness. Like they vaporized their own people to save them. So that’s all right. Isn’t it?”
“You’re doing that tight voice, Daddy. The one where it’s a joke but it isn’t actually funny.”
“I’m sorry, Piotr.” There was nothing like a perceptive child to put a man in his place. “You’re old enough to understand this. It’s too early to completely trust the COG without question after so many years of war, and they seem to feel the same about us. We have to earn one another’s trust.”
“But they killed everyone. They burned all the cities.”
“They burned their own, too. I know that’s hard to understand.” Trescu tried to be neutral to appease Ilina. “But the Locust were so dangerous that the COG thought it was worth doing anything to try to stop them.”
“But they didn’t burn Jacinto.” Piotr seemed to be following the logic pretty competently. “And the Lambent are even worse, everyone says. So… why don’t they use the Hammer again?”
“It doesn’t work properly now.” Trescu began to worry that Piotr was storing up a few nightmares for later. He had to distract him. “And Hoffman’s okay. He wouldn’t do it again. His wife died when the COG burned its cities, you see.”
Teo cocked his head. “Where did you hear that?”
“Yanik,” Trescu said. “He chats with Lieutenant Mathieson. Not much hard intel, but lots of interesting gossip.”
“So what do we do about the databurst?” Teo asked.
Trescu went on eating. “Nothing. And I don’t want everyone thinking we’re about to be incinerated, Teo—be sensible. Tell me if it happens again. But leave me to raise the matter with Hoffman.”
Piotr fished a chunk of leg bone out of his casserole and peered into the hole. He loved the marrow. It was his special treat and Ilina made sure he always got it now that meat was back on the menu. Trescu watched him scrape it out with the tip of his knife, frowning with concentration, and spread it on a crust. Vectes could have been a pleasant, well-fed exile. But it wasn’t Gorasnaya, and he had to remember that.
“Dad, am I allowed to speak to the Cogs?” Piotr asked. He took a child’s delight in using the word. It brushed close to a Gorasni profanity. “Is it true they eat cats?”
Stefan chuckled. “Only the sniper woman with the dog. Have you seen her boots? Tabby fur.”
/> “They’ve got a real thrashball star, Piotr,” Ilina said, shooting Stefan her narrow-eyed shut up look. “Maybe it’s better if you talk to him.”
Everybody loved thrashball. Piotr’s face lit up. “Can I, Dad? Please?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Trescu said, winking. He cleared his plate and got up, beckoning to Teo to follow him. “Sorry to run, Ilina, but we have to check a few things.”
Once they were at a safe distance from the tent, Stefan lit up another messily rolled cheroot. He looked sheepish when Trescu glared at him, but he lit it anyway.
“Aww, I couldn’t smoke on the rig, Commander,” he said. “Don’t be too hard on me.”
“Very well, enjoy it while you can.” Trescu checked his watch, the gold one his father had given him. It had been his grandfather’s, too. Both men would have had a fallback plan ready to roll out, even with their most trusted allies. They would have expected no less of him. “I want a contingency plan. I want to know how much fuel we could lay our hands on and how many people we could evacuate to the nearest land if we reach a point where we think the COG is unwise to stay here.”
Teo gave him a thumbs-up gesture and slapped Stefan on the back, making him cough up smoke. Even if the plan was never put into action, just knowing it was there would reassure people.
“But I like the Cogs, Teo,” Stefan said, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “You weren’t on Emerald Spar when the polyps attacked. You didn’t see how the Gears fought to save us. Not the drilling platform. Us.”
“I was there,” Trescu said. “And you’re right. They risked their lives for us. But this isn’t about friendship or gratitude. It’s about being prepared.”
Stefan gave him a wary look. “You wouldn’t return the favor? You wouldn’t go to their aid if they needed us?”
Trescu felt his scalp tighten a little. He felt suddenly dishonorable. He was doing his sworn duty, putting the defense of the Gorasni nation first, but the thought that he might abandon Gears to their fate after fighting alongside them suddenly stuck in his throat.
The psychological bonds forged in combat didn’t take much notice of flags, borders, or promises made to dying fathers. That came as a surprise to him.