He meshed his hands on the desk. It was his your-call gesture, a challenge to cave in or walk out. Hoffman needed to make his getaway before he was seduced into agreeing to something he’d regret. He made an effort.
“If you don’t need me anymore right now, Chairman, I need to catch up with debriefs.”
“I’ll ask you again, Victor.”
“You’ll get the same answer.”
“The obviously decent and manly thing to do isn’t always the thing that will save most lives.”
“I know that, too,” Hoffman said. For a moment something in him wanted to cooperate with Prescott, to justify this faith and flattery, this rare sense of personal connection, but he told himself that this was how politicians got the job done. They knew how to press those buttons. He had to resist. “But if I do something, I do it with full information at my disposal. Not on faith. Good day, sir.”
Hoffman made his way down the stairs, disturbed rather than angry. He knew what Michaelson would say. He can wind you up like a clockwork toy. But what if he was wrong? He’d never actually caught Prescott out in a real, solid lie. It was all omission. He had no benchmark of dishonesty to work with.
He dropped by CIC on his way out. “Mathieson, I’m going to catch up with Delta.” CIC was a different world, measurable and precise, where people told him the truth about anything he wanted to know. “What have I missed?”
Mathieson was looking more cheerful than Hoffman had seen him for a long time. The prospect of walking again, however hard it would be, had worked wonders. “Not much, sir. A couple more databursts while you were with the Chairman, but no more Lambent incursions. Mataki said she’d be in the sergeant’s mess in half an hour if you wanted to discuss the dog polyp thing. Mac won’t leave her so she had a bust-up with the cooks about taking a dog into a food area.”
“God Almighty,” Hoffman said. “We’re worried about health and safety violations when we’ve got glowies up our asses?”
“You know how folks are, sir.”
Hoffman was more baffled than ever by the databursts, but it wasn’t his biggest problem right then. Actually, he wasn’t quite sure which one was. It was hard to tell.
The stalks were still contaminating more land, the Lambent were showing up in increasingly bizarre forms, and he was none the wiser about the contents of that frigging disc. What he did know, though, was that Prescott seemed as helpless and desperate as he was.
At least he had fuel at his disposal. Imulsion would be their lifeline.
CONSTRUCTION SITE, TWO DAYS LATER.
Baird accepted that he had a short fuse where idiots were concerned but he felt he’d lost a few more centimeters in the last fifty-two hours since Eugen got killed. His flash-to-bang time, as Bernie put it, was zero.
He really should have had that beer with her. Cole was his buddy and he could talk anything over with him, anything at all, but Bernie was somehow… well, more like a doctor, or a priest, or an agony aunt, close enough to feel comfortable with but distant enough for loss of face to be irrelevant. She’d seen and done it all. He didn’t have to worry about looking like a dick in front of her.
He drove through the housing site, looking for Jace Stratton. The Packhorse creaked under the weight of timber and drums of bitumen. When he looked to either side at each crossroads—civvies just wandered around construction sites like suicidal chickens—he could see small knots of people huddled and talking to councilmen, not working.
The word was out. They’d heard about the bull. Had they heard about the dog-glowies yet? Every new act in the freak show started them fretting now. He thought they’d noticed that very few civvies were getting hurt and killed these days, a big improvement on the daily round of casualties back in old Jacinto, but no, some dick always had to whine about every damn thing.
It wasn’t just Ingram and his one-asshole-one-vote brigade who were arguing the toss now. Other civvies, the regular kind who’d sucked up the pain just the same as Gears since E-Day, were starting to wobble too.
A man in his fifties flagged Baird down. He had a saw in his hand, so Baird thought he was going to beg some timber from him. Baird stopped the Packhorse and wound down the window.
“This is all spoken for,” he said. “If you need materials, ask Parry.”
“You found that bull, didn’t you?”
Baird hadn’t even realized that people recognized him, let alone knew what he did. He didn’t take much interest in anyone outside his immediate circle so he assumed others couldn’t give a shit about him. Wow, this felt weird.
“Yeah,” he said, faintly disturbed. “What about it?”
“Are we all going to get infected?”
“What am I, a doctor?” Baird resented the man for worrying about his own ass when Eugen was dead. Yeah, I know. My own finest quality. “Look, I’ve been skewered by polyps and splattered with their guts, and I’ve not turned glowie. There’s such a thing as hypochondria, you know.”
Baird didn’t wait for a reply and just drove off. The mood was changing. He didn’t realize how quickly it was happening until he drove past Jace Stratton trying to hang a front door on one of the new houses—okay, huts—being built at the edge of the camp. The door hung from one hinge at a funny angle. Jace was surrounded by a gaggle of people, trying to explain something with the aid of a screwdriver. He looked like he was defending himself.
Okay… I’ll do the decent thing. Got to learn by doing, Bernie says.
Baird parked up and ambled over to the discussion.
“What’s the point wasting time on this?” one of the women was saying. Typical. Never satisfied, women. She took in the whole plot of new huts with a sweep of her arm. “We should be getting out of here while we can. We’ll need all this for the mainland. That’s what we should be doing, packing to go back to Tyrus.”
“Look, lady,” Jace said, “I don’t make the decisions. Now, anyone want to give me a hand with this door? ’Cause it’s real hard doing this single-handed.”
“What about that thing? That leviathan? It came right into the docks. The Hammer of Dawn couldn’t even kill it. We’re just sitting here like those chickens, waiting to have our necks wrung.”
Baird cleared his throat. “Hi folks. Not satisfied with the benevolence of the COG for some reason?”
The woman turned and stared at him. She could curdle milk with that face. “I don’t call being exposed to unnecessary risk benevolence.”
“You want to go back to the mainland?” Baird spread his hands. “Seriously? Have you got amnesia or something?”
The crowd was about fifteen people, mainly young mothers, kids, and a few older men who didn’t look fit enough for work duties. Even now that a couple of thousand extra civvies had been squeezed into the camp, Baird didn’t see much of these people and he didn’t know them. Jace gave him an exasperated glare and pointed to the door. Baird got the message and went over to support its weight for him.
“You’re not very respectful, young man,” said one of the old men. “You know this is the worst place to be stuck when those Lambent are closing in on us. We could always move around on the mainland.”
“Wow, there must have been a lot of head injuries around here,” Baird said. “Because I distinctly remember Jacinto being surrounded by grubs. Before we had to sink the whole city just to get away from them, that is.”
“We could still run somewhere.”
“This is that somewhere.” Baird wished he hadn’t started this. “Look, if you’d seen the recon postcards Hoffman brought back from his trip to Tyrus, you wouldn’t be rushing to pack your bags. Trust me. Shit Central, people.”
“Recon?” The old guy was so startled by the word that he didn’t even bitch at Baird for bad language. “You mean someone’s gone back already?”
“Nice one, Baird.” Jace sighed. “Stoke ’em up some more, why doncha.”
Baird didn’t realize the civvies didn’t know. It was just a recon. Everybody did recons. How else
did they think anyone could plan ahead for a possible evacuation?
“They only took a look,” Baird said defensively. “Prescott didn’t put down a deposit on the place or anything. You want to sail thousands of kilometers without knowing what it’s like first? Because it’ll be a one-way trip.”
“There’s a petition,” the woman said, as if that changed everything. “One of the other blocks did a petition. Consultation. We want a vote on whether we stay here or go now. If we’re willing to take the risk, the Chairman should respect that.”
Jace, who’d kept out of the debate to finish screwing in the hinges, swung the door shut. “Yeah. That’s it. I’m done. Come on, Baird. We’re just the hired help, remember?”
Baird started the Packhorse and drove east across the camp to the border between Little Gorasnaya and Civilization. That was what it said on the handwritten sign, anyway. He couldn’t read enough Gorasnayan to translate what the Gorasni had scrawled in retaliation underneath.
“The civvies got a point,” Jace said. “We gotta think ahead. Can’t just wait around to see if the stalks stop and things get better.”
“That’s what the management’s paid to decide.”
“But it’s all guesswork.”
“Hey, are you after my job as Resident Whiny Asshole?”
“Just sayin’.”
“They ought to trust the brass. How many civvies have died since we got here? Other than natural causes, I mean. A handful. They were being slaughtered every day back home. They don’t know they’re born.”
“Are you in love or something? ’Cause I ain’t seen you this positive about them upstairs. Ever.”
“Facts, Jace. Just the facts.”
Baird paused at a patch of open ground where Cole was teaching the camp kids the finer points of thrashball. Trescu’s son was really into it, all grim concentration like his dad while he practiced throw-ins. The class was a mixed bag of youngsters—Gorasni, Tyran, Pelruan, even a couple of ex-Stranded—and they all looked mesmerized by Cole’s moves. He always made it look so easy. He was also one hell of a showman. He scored, not really trying, and got all the kids lined up behind him pretending to be part of a locomotive chugging up to full speed.
“Whoo!” Cole pumped his arm like an engineer sounding a train’s whistle. “Whooo!”
Baird hadn’t seen him do that since before E-Day. It was always his victory dance when he scored for the Cougars.
One of the kids chimed in. “Whoo-whoo!”
“The Cole Train don’t go whoo-whoo,” Cole said, grinning. “The Cole Train goes whoooo!”
The train broke up and they went on playing again. “Damn, he’s still got the speed,” Jace said.
“Yeah—he’s the Cole Train.” Baird didn’t like the word still. “Why wouldn’t he?”
“It’s been fifteen years since he played, Baird. I mean, the man’s a legend, but his career was short. Five years. And he’s had a hard war.”
Cole looked genuinely happy. He usually did, but this was what he was born for: thrashball. Baird rarely felt sorry for anybody but himself and he accepted that wasn’t something to be proud of, but right then he felt terrible for Cole. Cole had been an international star. He’d been rich and adored, the biggest star of the biggest sport in the COG. He’d lost a lot more than Baird had. But he’d never once bitched about it, just joked at his own expense about how washed up he was and how all that money was just useful kindling now. Baird suspected the thrashball class was doing a lot more for Cole than it was doing even for the kids.
Good for you, buddy.
“Well, it keeps the little assholes out of trouble,” Baird said, and drove on.
When he got back to the vehicle compound, a couple of the civilian support staff were arguing in the garage about their chances of surviving on the mainland. The debate was spreading like a dose of clap.
“Either we’ve got a pandemic or else formative causation really exists,” Baird said.
“Well, they know Hoffman did the recon.” Jace picked a splinter out of his finger, wincing. “Come on, I’m so damn hungry I could eat Bernie’s cat curry. Hey, you know what she gave me?”
“A smack around the ear?”
“The Stranded left some feral moggies behind.” Jace pulled a pair of beige suede gloves out of his belt and showed them off. The inside was glossy black fur, definitely feline. “She’s the survival queen, Baird. And they do make damn fine gloves. Is it true they taste like rabbit?”
“I hope I never have to find out.”
“Well, rabbit tastes like rabbit. They usually got some in the mess if you get in line early enough.”
Baird wasn’t in the mood, but he followed Jace into the mess anyway. When they walked through the doors, the rapidly spreading interest in glowie bulls suddenly made more sense. There was a TV program on the monitor with actual moving pictures for a change. It was Prescott. Every Gear at the tables was watching in silence, shoveling down food on autopilot.
“Holy shit,” Jace said. “First time we see a show since we left Jacinto, and it’s starring him. Is it too much to ask for a goddamn movie?”
There were very few TV monitors around the base, mainly because there was no TV service. Occasionally, there’d be broadcasts of dreary still pictures trying to spice up equally dreary public information shit recorded for the radio, but New Jacinto had slipped back centuries in more ways than one. A guy had to make his own entertainment. Baird found his eyes being drawn hypnotically to the moving images even though it was Richard frigging Prescott.
Y’know, he can’t be so bad. He wanted me on his staff.
I never gave him an answer, though.
“Citizens,” Prescott said, making that one word sound like a divine announcement booming through parting clouds. Yeah, the guy had a hell of a delivery, Baird had to admit it. “I realize the situation is difficult at the moment, and many of you are finding it challenging to adjust to such crowded conditions. Your willingness to endure this is appreciated. But life must become more restricted while we deal with the changing threat facing us. Those of you who come from Jacinto, Branascu, or any of the mainland cities know how to handle this. Those of you who have never experienced Locust emergence will have to learn. Gears will be conducting safety drills so that you know what to do in the event of a Lambent attack. The important thing to remember is that we’ve dealt with similar situations before, we have survived, and we will survive again.”
Prescott paused for a moment. He looked down as if something was too painful to say—pure theater, because nothing ever was, not for that asshole—and then raised his eyes again, blinking a little.
“Our priorities are to secure the camp, deal with any polyp incursions, and to continue to salvage whatever we can of food crops and timber that falls within range of contamination,” he said. “But we also have to plan for the future. We’ve always intended to regain our strength here and, eventually, to return to Tyrus and start rebuilding the Coalition. Now that we have imulsion supplies, we’ll be carrying out regular reconnaissance missions to assess the changing situation on the mainland. That doesn’t mean we’re preparing to abandon this island. But it does mean that if the very worst were to happen, then we would be ready for it. I ask you to do what you do best—to remain calm and steadfast.”
Jace stopped eating. “Holy shit, that’s just gonna make the civvies want to leave sooner.”
“He’s covering his ass,” said one of the gunners at the next table.
Baird sighed. “You’re so cynical. That’s the problem with folks these days.”
The gunner burst out laughing and went on with his meal. Baird went through his hourly ritual of checking that the data disc was still safe in his pocket. Maybe that was why Prescott wanted him on his staff. The urgency of solving the mystery might have been overtaken by other events unfolding at a breakneck speed, but Baird still had a mission.
Everything that he imagined might be on it so far had been ruled out. It w
as infuriating, and it was also starting to worry him.
Okay… it can’t be a recipe for Lambency. It can’t be a police file on him whacking rivals, because what’s a few assassinations when you’ve chargrilled billions of COG citizens? If it’s blackmail photos of him doing the Locust Queen—nah, she’d have mentioned that when we had our little soirée in the tunnels, for sure. So what’s left? Drink, drugs, hookers? No, a guy would want to brag about that these days. Well, I would, anyway.
It’s got to be something we can’t even imagine yet.
Baird put the disc to the back of his mind and fretted about the stalks spitting out glowie dogs. If the civvies wanted to shit their pants and run, that was fine by him. The COG army could survive on its own. It had all the skills a society needed.
“Nice touch to mention Branascu,” Jace said, wolfing down his stew. “All one big happy family.”
“Yeah,” said Baird. “Shame about the abandon-ship bit, though.”
“So what do you reckon? You ever want to go back to Tyrus? I kinda like it here.”
It wasn’t a case of where for Baird. It was a case of who. The realization that he was actually quite attached to individuals made him feel scared in ways he couldn’t even pin down. It hurt. The more people he gave a damn about, the more anxious he felt.
“Put me down as a don’t-care,” he lied.
TEMPORARY HOUSING PLOT A5, NEW JACINTO.
“Have you heard?” Sam flipped through the sheets on her clipboard as the truck ground sedately through the dirt-track roads of the camp. “Mitchell says some of the dead zones have stopped spreading.”
“Which means?” Dom asked.
“Well… there’s got to be a maximum area they can kill off. They can’t get everywhere, and the contamination only extends so far.”