It was only postponing the problem. You couldn’t do deals with these people. But Michaelson probably hadn’t. He didn’t seem to see any agreement with Stranded as binding.
Cole wandered up to her and leaned on the rail. His skin tone looked distinctly gray. She didn’t think the boat was moving around that much, just gently rolling on the swell as the wind picked up. The mist was gone. It had the makings of a nice day.
“I’m all puked out, Boomer Lady,” he said. “I ain’t gonna be much use in this new seagoin’ world that Michaelson keeps talkin’ about.”
“I don’t think we’re going to run out of things to do ashore, somehow.” Bernie patted his back and took a firm grip on his belt. She hadn’t a hope in hell of stopping a man of his size from falling if he tipped over the rail, but she did it anyway. “We used to have drugs for seasickness. Maybe we can find some.”
“You got a cast-iron gut.”
She tilted her head in the direction of Trader. “Massy, you mean.”
“That as well.”
“I’m not gloating. I’m just making sure I’ve still got the courage of my convictions.”
“And then you leave it all behind you, right? Promise me.”
“Yeah. I think I purged my anger a long time ago. But some things get to be habit.”
Cole frowned and shook his head every time Massy shrieked. The sounds were muffled; the man was begging now. So his gang didn’t own the sea around here after all. She wondered if they were doing this in Falconer’s earshot to make the point that Jacques now ran the show and wasn’t afraid to go to extremes to enforce it.
“You gonna come inside, Bernie?”
She wanted to, but she couldn’t. “In a while. You go and get some fluids down you. You’ll be dehydrated.”
She went back to leaning on the rail, and Massy fell silent for a while. A couple of men from Trader boarded the second patrol boat they’d captured from Allam’s gang. After a few minutes, Trader got under way and headed west at a leisurely pace, trailing a wide wake of churning white foam. The patrol boat followed a hundred meters behind. And somewhere below, Clement was tracking them.
If Massy was still screaming for mercy, she wouldn’t hear him now. It was over. The sense of finality surprised her. Beneath her boots, the deck shivered as Falconer’s engines picked up speed and the patrol boat turned back to Vectes. The other gunboat bobbed in the wash as Falconer swung around.
Bernie walked down to the stern to watch Trader vanish and found Baird eyeing the salvaged gunboat with a frown, binoculars hanging from his neck.
“They wouldn’t let me drive it home,” he said.
“Let ’em do their sailor thing, Blondie.”
He pressed his earpiece. “Garcia’s not happy about something.”
“Really?” Bernie listened in to the voice traffic. “You reckon there’s a leviathan loose? Whatever that is.”
“Dunno.” He pointed. “Look. Clement’s got her radio mast up. Just breaking the surface.”
Bernie strained to look, but the entire ocean was spotted with foam and reflections. It was impossible to see whatever Baird was looking at. On the radio, Garcia was debating whether to ping the area with sonar and risk being detected.
“Can’t he tell what he’s hearing?” she asked Baird.
“The sea’s a noisy place. Picking out the sounds takes a skilled operator or really fancy computer analysis, and I don’t think he’s got either.”
“Fat lot of good he is, then.”
“It’s not like he’s up against a fleet of subs. But if we had a Raven here, some have sonar buoys.”
“Clement’s got sonar.”
“Yeah, but it’s about stealth. If he pings, he’s given away his presence and exact position. The Raven’s just dunking a buoy.”
They both stopped to listen to Michaelson’s voice.
“Clement, whatever the object is, is it going to compromise us?”
“If it’s a biologic, leviathan or not, it’s a collision risk, but—oh shit.”
“Say again, Clement.”
“Torpedo —brace brace brace.”
Bernie froze. She didn’t look at Baird. A few seconds later, an explosion launched a plume of water into the air nearly a kilometer away. Was that Clement? She had no idea where the submarine was.
“Shit, she’s been hit.” Baird fumbled for the binoculars. “What the fuck did that? If it’s a leviathan packing torpedoes, then we’re in deep shit.”
Bernie’s gut knotted. “Grubs don’t have that stuff. What can you see? Come on, is there debris?”
“Wait—no, Trader’s gone. That was Trader.”
Michaelson’s voice cut in. “Clement, what the hell have you done? I said follow her, not sink her.”
“That was not us. I say again, we did not fire, that was not Clement.” No, Garcia was still there; that was his voice on the radio, remarkably calm under the circumstances. “We heard the torpedo launch. Not ours. Time to worry.”
“Have you got a fix on it?”
“Nothing’s pinged us. We have an approximate bearing from the torpedo.”
By now, sailors and Gears had rushed out onto the deck to look. Bernie and Baird hung onto their front-row seats. If Garcia hadn’t accidentally fired a torpedo—and how the hell could someone do that, anyway?—then Bernie couldn’t imagine what else was out there, unless some Stranded had a submarine, and that was impossible. She’d have heard. It was just too big a deal for them to hide. They’d have used it before. Wouldn’t they?
Even Cole and Anya came out to watch. Marcus seemed to be checking where the life rafts were, which worried Bernie more than anything. She shut her eyes to concentrate on the radio, and the next thing she heard was the crew on the small gunboat. They were in one piece.
“You bastards. You gave your word.”
“We have not fired on you,” Michaelson said. “We have no idea what’s happened, but it wasn’t us. We keep our word, I assure you.”
Almost. Weren’t you going to follow them home to fry them later?
“Deal’s null and void, Coalition,” said the voice. “We can’t do business with you. Gloves off now.”
The small boat shot off at high speed. Bernie waited for it to vanish in an eruption of water too, but whatever had sunk Trader didn’t follow up. Maybe it had his hands full now evading Clement.
“We’re picking up faint propulsion sounds,” Garcia said. “It’s not biologic.”
“Locust bolt all kinds of devices onto living creatures.”
There was a pause. “Including ballast tanks?”
“What?” said Michaelson.
“Hydrophones just picked up something blowing its tanks. It’s another sub. Stand by.”
“You’re clear to engage.”
“We need to know what we’re firing at first, Captain.”
Bernie didn’t have a clue what submarines were capable of doing, or even if they could tell where a sound was coming from. Baird muttered something about needing hull sonar for Falconer. It was the first time Bernie had felt that this patrol boat, which seemed as solid as a fort to her, could be blown out of the water at any moment, and the only warning she’d get would be a streak of bubbles in the water seconds before a bloody torpedo ripped the hull apart. The guns mounted on deck were no use against that.
She added it to the list of reasons why she didn’t like the sea.
Michaelson, shouldn’t you be heading away from here at maximum speed or something?
It felt like a long time before anyone spoke again, but it was less than a minute.
“Something’s surfacing,” Garcia said. “We’ve got a fix on it. About thirty degrees off your port quarter, range eight hundred meters. Standing by to fire torpedoes.”
Baird was glued to his binoculars. “I see it. Look for the foam.”
Dom squeezed into the gap next to Bernie. “If it fires on us,” he said, “we’re really going to regret standing around watching.”
br /> “At least we don’t get trapped below,” she said. “Have we got enough life rafts and RIBs for the whole crew?”
And then a completely unknown voice broke into the comms net. It had a slight accent.
“Clement, this is Zephyr,” said the voice. “We’re surfacing. We’re not hostile. Stand down.”
Bernie saw a sudden pool of foam, and followed it until a dull black sail rose out of the sea. It sprouted masts almost immediately, and when the submarine settled on the surface, she didn’t look like Clement. Her bows were smooth. She looked smaller, like a stubby cigar.
“Holy shit,” Dom said. “They’re breeding.”
As they watched, another sail broke the surface in a cascade of foam, then a distinctive black sonar dome appeared. It was Clement. By the time the submarine was fully surfaced, Bernie could see crew already at the top of the fin, scanning the scene just like Falconer’s crew.
“Zephyr,” Michaelson said, “who are you, and why did you sink that damned ship?”
“Commander Miran Trescu, Republic of Gorasnaya, Union of Independent Republics,” said the unknown voice. “It’s been a long time. May we talk, Falconer?”
Michaelson usually had a smart line for every occasion, but even he took awhile to respond to that bombshell.
The UIR hadn’t existed since before E-Day. The COG had been at war with it for nearly eighty years before those short, short weeks of peace. Gorasnaya. Shit, they were one of the tiny lunatic republics that refused to accept the cease-fire. Nobody took account of them. They had very little left to fight with.
Unbelievable didn’t quite cover it, though. They still had a submarine, and they still thought they existed.
“No hard feelings,” Michaelson said at last. “But I suggest you explain what you’re doing before this becomes a very short conversation.”
“You might want to let pirates go free,” Trescu said, “but we take a harder line, and we’ve been tracking Jacques for days.”
“We?”
“We may be a small presence compared to you, but we’re still worth plundering. As I said, may we talk? I have as many questions for you and your Chairman as you have for me.”
Marcus finally reacted. “It’s a frigging Indie. Fifteen years after the armistice, and he shows up now?”
Bernie saw a crewman come out to the starboard bridge wing to take a photograph. Dom stared. “This is a joke, right?”
“Baby, I’m gonna take my seasick pills and lie down somewhere dark till this morning goes away,” Cole said.
Falconer’s deck had fallen silent—mostly. The only sound Bernie could hear now was Baird, and he was chuckling to himself.
“I’m glad you find it so fucking funny,” Marcus said. “Because we just made a new bunch of enemies.”
“Shit, we were going to finish off Jacques and his gang anyway.” Baird handed the binoculars to Marcus. “At least we got another submarine and a gunboat out of the trip.”
“You think Trescu is going to hand it over?”
“Why else would he surface and not just run?”
Bernie had once found Baird an irritating know-it-all, but now she understood that he really did have a good brain in that head, capable of shrewd assessment. Trescu wanted something beyond settling scores with pirates.
And Bernie was keen to find out where the rump of the UIR had been hiding.
Falconer headed back to Vectes, trailed by the small gunboat, and Clement kept a close tail on Zephyr. It was a strange flotilla by anyone’s standards. Bernie spent an hour or two hunched over the chart table, trying to work out where Trescu might have come from, and then a thought struck her—a surprising one simply because it had taken so long to dawn on her.
Jonn Massy had been given his quick release. And she felt neither guilty nor cheated. Now she could move on.
CHAPTER 18
Until we can get radar ground stations in place, we’ll rely on ships. Reassure the people in Pelruan that we can maintain a radar picket that should give us almost complete coverage of the coastline to a range of sixty kilometers. Tell them not to worry—the navy’s here.
(CAPTAIN QUENTIN MICHAELSON TO LEWIS GAVRIEL.)
CHAIRMAN’S OFFICE, VECTES NAVAL BASE, TEN WEEKS AFTER JACINTO EVACUATION, 14 A.E.
“Where do you want me to start?” Hoffman asked. “It’s a long goddamn list today.”
From the window of Prescott’s office, he could see the Indie submarine, real and black and troubling. The appearance of a boat from history was something of a sensation. A growing crowd of seamen and Gears had shown up to stare at it.
“Let’s start with Michaelson’s private war,” Prescott said. “We give him free rein to maintain maritime security. I don’t mind how many pirates he sinks. But I’d like more intelligence on who’s out there—the island communities we don’t know about. We didn’t destroy Jacinto to resume another war. We did it to save what little was left of humankind. We need people—numbers.”
“He says that was the idea. Clement didn’t attack Darrel Jacques.”
“Perception is everything. In due course, we might have some damage limitation to do.”
For a man who’d taken the decision to incinerate most of Sera, Prescott could have weirdly prissy moments. Hoffman gritted his teeth. The Chairman seemed to have forgotten that the last city-sized remnant of humanity was clinging to life here, however idyllic the country seemed. Most of it was still living on board ships or in crowded dockyard accommodations. Hoffman decided he couldn’t get too worked up about a few gangs until the more pressing problems had been solved.
It wasn’t a grub leviathan. That was all that mattered. A few time-forgotten Indies—he could handle them just fine.
“So is the Indie submarine a surprise to us all, or just me?” Hoffman didn’t expect to get an answer, but he asked again anyway, battening down his natural urge to bang Prescott’s head on that damn desk. “If there’s any more classified material around, it would be a good idea to declassify it now, because we don’t know what’s relevant and what isn’t.”
Prescott did a slow head shake, apparently racking his memory. “I can’t think of anything.”
Hoffman decided he no longer had an obligation to be straight with Prescott. It wasn’t sulky retaliation, just the last exhausted stage of trying to maintain a one-sided relationship. There was no point asking about the freakish life-forms—the sires—and other bizarre discoveries that Delta had made back on the mainland. He bet that he wasn’t alone in his frustration, either, because Marcus Fenix was almost certainly feeling the same way about his father’s connection with the Locust. That was in the past now.
If I sat down with Marcus over a beer, would he discuss it with me?
Hoffman realized he was thinking of him as Marcus again, not Fenix. It was a barometer of the state of their relationship.
“So we’re moving from a land forces doctrine to a maritime one,” Prescott said. “How do you feel about that?”
I know you’re going to enjoy playing me off against Michaelson, and you won’t even realize you’re doing it, you bastard. So give him my job, if you like. He’s a good man. And I’m frigging tired.
“Feelings don’t matter, Chairman.” Hoffman was still watching Zephyr, moored alongside Clement, and marveled at the endurance of damned pointless ideas. What kind of fool would bust a gut maintaining a submarine for all those years, wasting precious resources and sweat on something that was useless without a fleet to work with it? Maybe a fool who just hoped that one day he’d find that fleet. “We’re recolonizing our own land. We’ll need to secure fuel and mineral supplies back on the mainland, and then we’ll need to reclaim it, grubs or no grubs. It’s a maritime operation.”
“You don’t feel threatened by it, then.”
“No, just conscious that Gears will have to adjust to being seagoing soldiers.”
“Perhaps threatened wasn’t an appropriate word,” Prescott said. “I meant that change is unsettling
for us all.”
“I’m all for a change that lets my Gears sleep and get their sanity back.”
“You’re more diplomatic than Dr. Hayman.” Prescott looked Hoffman up and down as if he was checking for leaks. “She says traumatic stress is endemic, and we’re such a small population that it’s already become a culture of abnormal psychology. Sometimes she says we’re all frigging lunatics instead, of course. Now that we’ll have to mix with relatively … normal people, we have to take account of that.”
We’re all fucked up. You don’t need a medical degree to work that out.
“I know Pelruan folk think we’re all dangerous psychos,” said Hoffman, “but I like us that way. It’s what we are. And it’s not exactly abnormal to be strung out when you’ve had grubs chewing your collective ass for fifteen years. It’d be abnormal to be relaxed.”
“Yes, but it concerns me to hear evacuees and Gears looking down on the local population as having had it easy here.”
“Well, they have.”
“Even so, we have to build bridges. We need them, Victor. As support, as people. We need cohesion.”
“One happy family.”
“We can’t afford to rebuild Sera from a divided society. Schisms only get bigger. We’ll learn from history.”
Of course we will. The new political will. My ass.
And now the Indies were back, in small bite-sized pieces, so Prescott could test his will right away. Gorasnaya was only a tiny fractious corner of the old alliance, a bunch of guerillas rather than a major player like Pelles, but it had the potential to be trouble. In a world that had shrunk to a small city, people like that punched above their weight. Hoffman wanted to see their credit rating before he’d accept them on the lifeboat.
Prescott checked his watch again. “Commander Trescu’s late.”
“He’s a whole war late, Chairman.”
Hoffman resisted attempts to fill the small-talk gap. There was nothing to do but wait for Michaelson and Trescu. Prescott had set up his offices in a former sail loft in the oldest part of the base, a relic from a navy that predated the COG by centuries. The room was light and airy, at odds with the utilitarian furniture, chart boards, and filing cabinets that had been taken out of storage. If Hoffman wanted to leave anything in the past he’d get little chance today. Not even the UIR would let him forget it.