Coalition's End

Ogari was getting closer, changing into constellations of lights. Dizzy could pick out the towers and storage tanks of the refinery.

  I’m going home.

  Yeah. Hope Lena likes the necklace. ’Cos it’s a damn long way to take it back to get a refund…

  A flash of light caught his eye and he looked up. He could have sworn it was a burst of flame, but he couldn’t tell from the faint afterglow if it was the refinery flaring off gas or just the first rays of the sunrise catching something he couldn’t see. He went back to contemplating the horizon and tried to remember the name of that damn bar.

  Cantari? Coroneta? It’ll come to me…

  He raised his binoculars and had another look at the refinery, still a few klicks away. A long trail of vapor drifted lazily from one of the cooling towers. As he scanned the coastline, he picked up movement and saw a small port authority boat heading out at high speed. It was the harbor pilot. A big, awkward girl like the Star had to be guided into a busy port because some folks didn’t seem to understand a tanker couldn’t swerve to avoid them.

  But the pilot was on a different course. Dizzy watched the boat peel away and head up the coastline.

  It was just routine, something that Dizzy saw every day of his working life. He thought nothing of it until the ship’s collision alarm went off at ass-clenching volume and he almost dropped the binoculars.

  The siren switched immediately to the muster alarm—two short blasts, repeating—and Dizzy decided that Robb was either jerking his chain or he’d accidentally hit the controls.

  That was hard to do, though, and Robb wasn’t the jerking-around kind. But Dizzy was damned if he could see anything worth alerting all hands for. It wasn’t the fire alarm, for sure.

  “Goddamn it, Robb, you nearly made me shit myself!” Dizzy moved toward the center of the deck so he could be seen from the bridge. He gestured to indicate what-the-hell. “There ain’t nothin’ out here!”

  Robb couldn’t hear him, of course. But he was gesturing back at Dizzy to come up top, and he didn’t look as if he was joking. Something was wrong.

  “Goddamn.” Dizzy listened for changes in the engine noise as he made his way back up the deck in a hurry. That was all it could be, an engineering problem. That was shitty timing. He’d be stuck in port fixing it now and he could kiss goodbye a week of his leave. “What the hell is it now?”

  He ran up the exterior metal stairway to the bridge wing and opened the door to find a dozen of the Star’s crew clustered around the radio. Robb had the mike handset to his mouth, his thumb hovering over the transmit button. His gaze was fixed on the speaker suspended above the helm position.

  Everyone was listening intently to a crackling transmission, and that was the moment when Dizzy realized the crisis wasn’t a leaking valve or anything else he could fix with a wrench.

  He just caught a few words. Someone behind at the door shoved him impatiently, but he couldn’t look over his shoulder. The voice traffic froze him to the spot.

  “I repeat, we’re under attack. We’re shutting the port. Any vessels alongside—we’re getting them out fast as we can.”

  “PHM, roger that, we’ll assist. Estimate fifteen minutes. Audacious out.”

  Audacious was an NCOG warship. “What the hell’s happening?” Dizzy asked.

  “They’ve started it again, the Indie fuckers.” Dolland, one of the cooks, raked his fingers through his hair. His apron was covered in some kind of brown sauce. “We can’t dock.”

  Dizzy was crushed. All he could think of was Richie being recalled and how short the peace had been. He should have known it wouldn’t last. The war had been going on too long for folks to break the habit.

  “What have they done?” he asked.

  Robb pressed the transmit button. “PHM, this is crude tanker Betancourt Star. We picked up your transmission to En-COG. Please advise, over.”

  “Harbor Pilot to Betancourt Star, we’ve got a situation here. You’re going to have to divert to the military port at Cape Aelis, over.”

  “Understood. Betancourt Star out.” Robb slipped back into the cockpit chair. “All stop. Let’s wait for the pilot.” He leaned across the console and switched on the long-wave radio. “Okay, it’ll be on the news. I bet we’ll hear more than we’ll get from the harbor master.”

  “But we can see the refinery from here,” Dizzy said. “We can see the goddamn town, too.”

  “Yeah, but why can’t we see anything else?” Dolland craned his neck to get a better look. “Where’s the helicopters? I don’t hear any gunfire, either.”

  “Maybe they just strolled in with rifles,” Robb said.

  “But Ogari’s the best part of a thousand klicks from any UIR border. How did they get here?”

  Robb was getting impatient. “I’m not the Indie chief of staff, kid. I don’t know how they did it. But they did.”

  Dizzy squeezed out of the packed bridge and made his way down to the deck again, followed by Dolland and one of the other engineers, Welson. They stood on the port side and stared at Ogari’s skyline. Eventually, most of the crew who weren’t on watch came out on the deck to look.

  Dizzy hadn’t imagined those flames. The city was under attack.

  An explosion lit up the sky and sent thick clouds rolling high into the air. A heartbeat later, Dizzy heard the distant boom.

  “Well, shit,” Welson said. “The assholes must be targeting all the refineries.”

  The crew watched helplessly, saying nothing. The silence was broken by a tinny voice. Dizzy turned to see where the sound was coming from. Dolland was holding a small radio to his ear, listening to the news.

  “Turn it up, buddy,” someone said.

  Dolland obliged. “It’s a bad signal. Maybe they took out a transmitter too.”

  So the Pendulum Wars weren’t over. The surrender was all a double cross, a goddamn bluff to get the COG to drop its guard. Dizzy felt almost choked by anger and betrayal.

  “You rot in hell, you Indie bastards!” It was dumb cursing an enemy that didn’t even know he was out here, let alone hear him, but what kinds of assholes broke ceasefires like that? “Fuck you! We should have finished you all off with the Hammer of Dawn, not just a couple of goddamn ships!”

  “Amen to that, buddy,” said Welson.

  Dizzy didn’t know he had that much venom in him. He didn’t even get that mean when he was drunk. He’d just finally gotten used to the idea that the war was over, and now he had to start all over again.

  Indies were rotten to the core. That was all there was to it.

  Maybe it’ll all be over again in a couple of days. The Chairman won’t take this shit lying down. Not now he’s got the Hammer. They’ll wind their necks in once he fries a few cities like he promised.

  More explosions ripped along the skyline. Dizzy could definitely see the fierce yellow glow of flames in the refinery now. Dolland retuned the radio and held it closer to his ear; his expression changed.

  “Listen, it’s not them,” Dolland said. “It’s not the Indies. It’s something else.”

  Welson turned around. “What do you mean, something?”

  “The news says they’re not human.”

  “Whoa, so they’re fucking performing seals or something?”

  Dizzy had to repeat it to himself before the words sank in. “Aw, goddamn it, make sense, buddy. Come on, what are they, Gorasnayans? Those assholes never accepted the ceasefire.”

  “I don’t know what the hell they are. And neither does anyone else from the sound of it. But it’s not the Indies.”

  Robb leaned out of the bridge door and yelled down at the crew.

  “Get up here!” he called. “Quick! Dalyell’s on the radio!”

  When Dizzy followed Welson onto the bridge, the atmosphere was different—not just tense, but scared into silence, and the merchant navy didn’t scare easy. Just about the whole crew was crammed in there now, twenty men, even though they could have listened in their cabins. Dizzy felt they were all
clinging together out of fear and disbelief. Everyone had that same lost stare. Dizzy perched his backside on the edge of the chart table and listened.

  The voice of Chairman Dalyell was crystal clear. It was pretty steady, too, considering the news he was breaking to the world.

  “Citizens, we don’t know what these creatures are, other than the fact that they’re not human. We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know what they want. But they’re tunneling under our cities and emerging to slaughter our people. Our combined forces throughout Sera have been mobilized to deal with them. I ask you all to remain calm, as you have done through so many years of war. Stay in your homes unless ordered to evacuate, and listen for emergency information on all broadcast stations. That, my fellow citizens, is all I can tell you until the situation becomes clearer.”

  Nobody said a word for a few moments. Then Welson broke the silence.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “It can’t be true. It’s some exercise. Some shit like that.”

  Dizzy could only think of Lena and Richie back in North Sherrith. What was happening to them? He had to find a way to call them. “Where else have these things come up?” he asked. “Do we know yet?”

  “The news said Jannermont, for sure. It also said all across Sera.” Robb held up the maritime satellite handset. Dizzy could hear the faint voice of a recorded message repeating that the service was temporarily unavailable. Every damn ship out there had probably decided to call in at the same time and overloaded the sat network. “Everyone pick one number to call, because we’re all going to want to ring someone to see if they’re okay when the sat’s back in service. It’ll probably be the only chance you’ll get.”

  It was funny how the body didn’t really need any help from the mind to carry on doing what it needed to do. Dizzy, unable to think straight beyond how he was going to get in touch with Lena, found himself putting on his ear defenders and heading for the engine room to check the generators. It was like a reflex. The second engineer, Milos, was already down there, wiping his hands on a rag.

  “Diz, are they aliens or something?” Dizzy read his lips. “How did they get here? Did they land? I mean, I know everyone’s saying they came out of holes in the ground— but how come we’ve never seen them before? You don’t just get a whole new breed of things come out of nowhere like that.”

  Dizzy couldn’t think beyond the moment. The creatures were here. His family was somewhere else, without him and probably shit-scared, and he had to get to them. He just had to.

  Canopus.

  He remembered it now, just when he didn’t need to—the name of the bar.

  It was the Canopus. He wondered if it was on fire, burning with the rest of Port Ogari as creatures nobody could fight off or explain away destroyed Sera one city at a time.

  CHAPTER 5

  They think we’re paranoid. They wonder why we still keep them at arm’s length. Five centuries ago, we won and lost an empire of four hundred million citizens. During the Pendulum Wars, Gorasnaya’s population fell from twenty million to ten. After E-Day, it was two million. After the COG deployed the Hammer of Dawn, we were reduced to fifty thousand. Now, after the Stranded massacres and the famines and the disease and the cold, there are only four thousand of us. And they wonder why we always have one eye on the exit.

  (Commander Miran Trescu, on the cultural gulf between Gorasni and the COG, 15 A.E.)

  NEW JACINTO, VECTES: THE PRESENT DAY, 15 A.E.

  Miran Trescu tried not to break into a run as he headed for the helicopters. That smacked of desperation, and he refused to look needy in front of the COG. It had been hard enough crawling to the old enemy for help. Now he had to rely on their air assets.

  But he had no intention of sitting on his backside waiting for crumbs of information from Prescott—or Hoffman. He hoped the assault rifle slung across his back made that clear.

  The COG troops stood around in small groups, poring over maps. Hoffman was deep in conversation with Marcus Fenix, Santiago, and the big thrashball player, Cole. Baird wasn’t there; nor were the female Gears who occasionally patrolled with them, but this was the core of Delta Squad, and that meant this was a crisis.

  Trescu was struck by how much Hoffman relied on Delta when he still had a couple of brigades at his disposal, as well as some apparently competent if unlikable majors and an assortment of lieutenants. Yanik said it was a regimental thing. They shared a common tribal bond, that death’s-head emblem of the 26th Royal Tyran Infantry bearing the motto Unvanquished. Trescu understood tradition and heritage all too well.

  But we’re the vanquished. What do I have to show for throwing my lot in with the COG? We’ve lost our flagship and our imulsion platform. We’re marooned here. And I have to beg for a ride in a COG helicopter.

  But Gorasnaya still existed. His people still survived, after a fashion. And that was all that mattered.

  Trescu slowed down as he approached Hoffman, imagining his father’s reaction if he’d lived to see his son finally agree peace terms with the COG. General Egar Trescu would have backhanded him across the face before disowning him. He’d made his son promise never to surrender. It was a terrible thing to break a promise to a dying man.

  But it’s a different war now, Papa. The old enemy is irrelevant. We’re fighting extinction. And that is something I shall never bow to.

  Hoffman stopped talking and turned as Trescu came up to him. He never looked a happy man at the best of times, but today was clearly not one of his better days. The thuggish shaven head and abrupt manner weren’t a veneer for some misunderstood poetic soul. Sometimes, though, they seemed to be a shield held up against the terror of failure.

  I know that feeling, Hoffman. I know what it’s like to be afraid that your mistakes could mean the end of your people.

  “Commander,” Hoffman grunted.

  “Colonel,” Trescu said. “Are you flying reconnaissance today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’d like to join you.” Hoffman always responded best to plain language. “If I go back to my people with a first-hand report rather than relaying yours, it will be far easier to manage their expectations.”

  “They won’t swallow my imperialist COG bullshit, you mean.”

  “Exactly.”

  Hoffman pointed to one of the Ravens without blinking, as if the comment had bounced straight off him. In another world, Trescu decided he might have grown to like the man. “KR-Two-Three-Nine,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable, Commander.”

  The Raven crew chief greeted Trescu at the door with a casual salute and handed him a radio headset. The tab on his armor said mitchell k. and he looked to be in his early twenties. The Pendulum Wars were probably only a vague memory from his childhood if he recalled them at all, and that brought home to Trescu how few years separated the seasoned vets like Fenix from the men they now served with. The word Indie didn’t evoke quite the same emotion in the likes of Mitchell as it did in the others. The monsters he’d grown up dreading were Locust, not other humans.

  And my son… he doesn’t remember any other kind of war. Or a Gorasnaya with an army and an empire.

  “We’re going to recce the interior, sir,” Mitchell said, fiddling around with a battered camera. He indicated the lens. “Don’t tell Baird, but I liberated one of the bot video feeds.”

  “Won’t he realize that when he sees the images?”

  “Too late then, sir. Possession’s nine-tenths of the law.”

  The camera had a distinctive logo—the stylized ever-watching eye of the Ephyran TV station that Trescu had once despised for being a tame propaganda mouthpiece for the COG.

  “Did you liberate that, too?”

  “There’s only bad news these days,” Mitchell said. “The hacks are much happier now they’re doing something productive.”

  “Productive?”

  “Crops need growing. Homes need building.” Mitchell stuck his head out of the bay door and tested the camera’s focus. “It
’s not as if there’s any real news to cover, is there?”

  The COG hadn’t changed much, then. And they had the audacity to call us an oppressive regime.

  Fenix and Dom Santiago jumped into the helicopter followed by Hoffman. He sat down facing Trescu and didn’t wait for the Raven to get airborne before refolding a map and slapping it on Trescu’s knees. The two men were a meter apart, no more, but Trescu had to listen on the radio to hear him.

  “Here’s the geology.” Hoffman ran his forefinger along curving penciled lines on the map, his hands surprisingly well manicured despite a lot of cuts and bruises. “Big rifts in the bedrock here, here, and here. Basically, they cut off the northwest of the island, slice through the central uplands, and fork south around here. They’re mostly at the center around the volcano.”

  Trescu studied the map. The single north-south fissure on the survey map stopped forty kilometers north of the naval base. “The stalks might not be able to reach the settlement, then.”

  “But we don’t know how many small fissures and lava tunnels there are. We’ll see.”

  Trescu was aware of Fenix studying him, just an occasional passing glance, but whenever Fenix was looking, Trescu knew he was analyzing. Trescu didn’t attempt to carry on the conversation as the helicopter headed north over farmland and into the island’s interior. Ravens seemed much noisier than the UIR’s Khimeras. But perhaps he was just letting the filter of nostalgia deceive him. There were no Khimeras left for comparison.

  Dom didn’t meet his eyes. He was staring out of the bay door, his rifle on his lap, but it was hard to tell if his mind was on something else or if he simply didn’t like the company of an Indie. Yanik—always gossiping with the unfortunate Donneld Mathieson—said Dom’s brother had been killed in the Pendulum Wars, like Lieutenant Stroud’s mother. The years that had passed hadn’t healed or erased the pain, but had simply been crossed off in calendars. Trescu understood that too.

  The radio crackled. “I’m following the line of the rift now,” the pilot said. “Can’t see anything yet.”