“Whoo!” Cole started picking off polyps trying to flank him on the right, spraying short bursts. The earsplitting noise was like a chaotic artillery battle, sporadic bangs that occasionally turned into chains of firecrackers when an exploding polyp set some others off. “Remember that plastic bubble stuff you could pop for fun? Hell, these assholes are way better!”
“Yeah, let’s market them.” Baird felt that familiar chill flood his guts as the polyps started coming at him a bit faster than he could take them out. They were gaining ground. Two broke away and forced him to turn his back on the others to aim at them. “Like skeet shooting. Shit, when are these things going to stick to a plan? I tell you, they’re getting smart.”
“Yeah, come on, Kenyon!” Cole sounded like he was having fun. Baird suspected he wasn’t but probably thought he had to keep everyone’s morale up. “Save us some ammo!”
For a moment, the polyps looked as if they were thinning out. Baird got ready to sprint for it, but then another fresh wave boiled out of the churned soil around the stalks and headed his way. They were too smart now to rush in a nice orderly carpet. They swerved, jinked, and generally made it damn hard for him to target them. The assholes were definitely learning. They weren’t going to get lured into traps and ambushes anymore. Baird found himself running further than he’d realized to chase one down, and suddenly three more were behind him.
Oh God, I’m going to die. Outsmarted by a frigging crab.
He whirled around. The difference between popping them and getting fragged by them was a matter of seconds. He caught a flash in the corner of his eye as he aimed and a polyp exploded close enough to splatter him. He recovered in time to let the other two have the full clip, then turned to see that it was Dom who’d saved his ass. Dom just did an angry, two-fingered look-where-you’re-going gesture.
“Fire!” he yelled. The Raven was so close overhead that it was hard to even hear him over the radio. “Goddamn fire!”
“Y’know, I never thought of doing that.”
Dom yelled again. “Fire! Shift your ass, Baird!”
“Look, dickwad, I—” Baird turned again and found he was looking southeast into an advancing wall of flame. “Oh, that fire.”
Kenyon’s Raven had finally shown up, advancing in a leisurely parallel line along the path of the stalks with its flamethrower. The closer it got, the louder the roaring and popping grew. Trees ignited. The stalks were enveloped in smoke and flame, and more polyps made a run for it. Kenyon peeled off to roast a bunch of them making a dash across the adjoining field. Baird couldn’t see any polyps in front of him now.
“He’s going to set the whole thing alight,” Dom said.
The jet of flame licked down from the Raven’s door and billowed across the field. Explosions in the grass went off like flashbulbs at a movie premiere. Baird bent over with his hands braced on his knees to catch his breath, wondering how long it would be before they ran out of ammo chasing every last frigging polyp, then realized he could hear someone yelling behind him.
Marcus was trying to calm the guy down. It looked like the farmer whose land was being turned to charcoal.
“It’s okay, Seb,” Marcus kept saying. “It won’t spread. It’s too damp.”
“It’s my damn wheat,” Seb sobbed. “I’ve lost my bull. Now you’re torching my wheat. For God’s sake, you’re doing more damage than the polyps.”
So it wasn’t grass. Baird added it to his list of interesting rural facts. Seb turned around, throwing up his arms in frustration, and called his dogs. They didn’t come. He walked toward the trees on his left and stood there whistling and yelling their names.
Kenyon’s voice came over the radio. “I think we got ’em all, Fenix. I’m heading back to VNB.”
“Yeah, you got ’em all right,” Marcus said. He went after Seb. “Okay, let’s carry on and clear the farm.”
But Seb wasn’t going to leave until he had all his cattle. Baird could hear the argument going on.
“But there’s six of them still out there, including one of the bulls. And the cows are in calf.” Seb went to walk into the woods, but Marcus caught his arm. “And my dogs. They went after them.”
“You’re going into a contaminated zone.” Marcus was all calm reason. “The dogs will come back. We’ll find the cattle. But you’ve got to leave now. You’ve just seen how risky it is.”
“You lose crops and animals—you starve,” Seb said. “Do you get it? We keep you fed, and it’s not easy.”
Marcus dropped his voice a little. “I’ll get Mataki to bring them back. She was a beef farmer. Let’s leave it to her.”
Baird gave Dom an impatient look and held out his wrist to indicate the watch. “Tell Farmer Giles to write off Daisy as barbecue. It’s deductible.”
“He’s got a point,” Dom said. “No farms, no food.”
Seb walked away toward the farmhouse, shaking his head. The flames in the wheat were dying down but it was still a hell of a mess out there. The pall of smoke must have been visible from Pelruan.
“I thought it was grass,” Baird said. “It looked like grass.”
“Wheat.” Marcus looked north-west in the direction of Pelruan and pressed his earpiece. “Ask Mataki to teach you crop recognition… Colonel? Fenix here. Have you had a sitrep from Sorotki?” Marcus got that defocused look as if he was waiting for a response. He grunted a few times, looked down at his boots, and nodded. “Okay. We’ll finish up here. Fenix out.”
“What did he say?” Dom asked.
“Compulsory evacuation,” Marcus said, walking off. “He’s decided to clear Pelruan whether they like it or not.”
TWENTY KILOMETERS SOUTH OF PELRUAN, NORTHERN VECTES.
Isabel Hayman gazed out of the Packhorse’s side window in silence, and that bothered Hoffman more than having her in full vitriolic flood.
In the past few weeks she’d only spoken to him when she absolutely had to. He knew why. She didn’t forgive. She blamed Hoffman for letting Trescu shoot a wounded Stranded prisoner in her hospital. He couldn’t really argue with that, but he wasn’t going to apologize.
What he didn’t know was why she’d asked to come to Pelruan with him. But he needed to mend some fences with her and he was ready to eat some humble pie if that was what it took. The last senior ER doctor left in the COG was a lot more use to him than the Chairman.
They’d be in Pelruan soon. He couldn’t stand it any longer. “Did you have something to say to me, Doctor? Because you haven’t come along for the pleasure of my company.”
It was odd to see Hayman without her white lab coat. It was her armor, her uniform, her statement to the world. Without it she’d dissolved into a frail, wispy-haired, elderly woman—until she opened her mouth.
“You got that right.” Hayman was pushing eighty, the former chief of ER at Jacinto’s main teaching hospital, and her snarling exterior didn’t veneer a grandmotherly heart of gold. She was an angry bitch to the core. “I was hoping for a private discussion. Can’t get much more private than this.”
“You want to unburden yourself, Doctor?”
“I want to know what the hell’s going on. Why Prescott keeps bringing me his garden waste to analyze.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Well, it isn’t going to respond to antibiotics or bed rest, that’s for sure.” Hayman let out a long hoarse sigh and searched in her pocket for something. It was going to be her damned cheroots. He knew it. “Everyone thinks I’m omniscient. I’m an emergency physician.” She parked the unlit smoke in the corner of her mouth. “Not a veterinarian, and you can remind your lady friend about that. Or a fortuneteller. Or a damn microbiologist, or an analytical chemist, or whatever the hell Prescott thinks the word doctor means. Does he know anything about scientists?”
“Maybe he’s forgotten what they look like. We lost all the grown-up ones.”
“That’s damned careless.”
There was no harm showing dissent in front of Hayman. A
ny respect for authority was weak-mindedness as far as she was concerned. “Yeah. Isn’t it.”
She patted her pockets as if she was now looking for matches. Hoffman didn’t volunteer to find a light for her.
“It was just dead leaf mold, soil, and imulsion,” she said. “The stalks were interesting structures under magnification. A little like bone, but neither plant nor animal.”
“Is that possible?”
She looked at him as if he was an idiot. “Fungi fall into that gray area. Nearer to animal, in fact.”
“So you’re not just a simple scab lifter.”
“That’s just high school science, Colonel, and my microbiology lab is a fifty-year-old microscope from the School of Dentistry.”
“I didn’t have a fancy education, Doctor.”
“It shows.” She was still rummaging in her pockets. “Anyway, I gave him the damn microscope in the end and told him to do it himself. He’s got as good a chance of making sense of it as I have.”
“So what do you want from me? Not my scientific opinion, obviously.”
“Tell me what you’re holding back.”
“About the Lambent? Not a goddamn thing.” He almost mentioned the disc. Damn, he was trying to justify himself to her. “Let’s just say it’s a contentious issue between me and His Highness.”
“Cut the bullshit. Is it one of the biological weapons programs they used to have here?”
Hoffman hadn’t put those two elements together before. Now he wondered why. He got that feeling—the tight scalp, dry mouth—that he’d had when Prescott had declassified the New Hope facility, and he still didn’t know exactly what biological reasons the COG had gotten up to there.
You sat on that, you fucker. Now I bet you’re sitting on this. Is that what’s on your goddamn disc? Is this one of our own bioweapons that we let loose on the grubs and it’s come back to bite us in the ass?
But something wasn’t quite right. The grubs had been driven out of their tunnels by the Lambent. That was why they came to the surface. It had seemed like an interesting detail when Delta Squad had discovered it in the Locust records stored in their tunnels, but now it was a worrying anomaly.
If the Lambent were the result of a COG bioweapon, then it predated E-Day. And that meant someone knew they were down there, and that the Locust were coming.
“Dear God Almighty,” Hoffman said to himself. “And this island was his choice of location. Not ours.”
“You really are just a simple grunt, aren’t you, Hoffman?”
He grappled with the thought that his own government, the flag he’d served all his life, might be responsible. But it wouldn’t have been the first time that the COG had unleashed a weapon of mass destruction against an enemy and killed its own people instead.
No, I did. I killed millions. I turned the Hammer of Dawn command keys with Prescott and Bardry. For what? For this?
“If he knows what it is, he’s hiding it well,” Hoffman said, wondering why the Lambent had now dwindled in his mind to a monster less efficient than himself. “Maybe that’s not an answer. He might know what it is, but not how to fix it.”
“He’d know. But then you’d know if it had been deployed against the grubs. You used to be Director of Special Forces.”
“Don’t bank on it.” Hoffman was rerunning old conversations and searching for clues he’d missed at the time. He couldn’t pin it down, but if this was the COG’s doing, there was something that didn’t make sense. “He’s still keeping stuff from me. I don’t know any more than you do, and you can believe that or not as you see fit.”
“Oh, I believe you,” she said. “You wouldn’t let your Gears go through this if you knew something.”
No, not now. I kept my mouth shut once. Never again.
She went quiet. She seemed to have found her matches. It took her three attempts to light the cheroot, and Hoffman was about to ask her not to smoke in his damn Packhorse when he saw that her hands were shaking. He let her blow out a stream of pungent smoke and said nothing.
“When you get old, Colonel—really old, my kind of old—you’ll find yourself looking at the way the world is going,” she said at last. “And you comfort yourself with the thought that you’ll be dead before any of the shit hits the fan. But I won’t be, damn it. I think I’ll still be here.”
Hoffman could now see the smoke from the stalk fire on the skyline. It looked no more menacing than burning crop stubble. “Well, we do what we can. I’ve got to face a few thousand people who don’t want to leave their homes.”
“Your biggest problem is going to be famine, regardless of whether this thing is a pathogen that can cross the species barrier or not. The food chain’s fragile.”
“Well, we’ve got Lambent grubs. Lambent leviathans. Lambent eels.”
“Doesn’t necessarily follow that it’ll show up in anything else. Worry about the vegetables first.”
“Ever feel like you’re pissing in the wind, Doc?”
“Every fucking day.” Hayman let out another long breath of smoke, filling the vehicle. “And I still hold you responsible for letting that savage Trescu murder one of my patients.”
“I can live with that, Doctor.”
They’d reached a brutal kind of truce, an agreement to dislike but trust one another. Hoffman drove on in silence. The Packhorse passed a stand of dead stalks and Hayman swiveled in her seat to stare.
“Hell of a day out,” she said.
As Hoffman drove down the approach road to Pelruan, he could already see some people loading up vehicles outside their houses. A lot of the locals didn’t have transport, not even pushbikes. They relied on the farm trucks and utility vehicles if they wanted to venture out of town, something they hadn’t needed to do in a long time. It was going to take COG vehicles to evacuate them all.
He slowed the Packhorse to acknowledge a middle-aged couple cramming tools into the back of a pickup. There was a name painted on the driver’s door, faded and flaking now but still legible: j.h. tillo—plumber. It might have just been someone else’s truck. Hoffman stopped and leaned out.
“Are you a plumber, sir?”
The man looked startled, as if he hadn’t seen the Packhorse coming. “I am.”
“Report to Staff Sergeant Parry at the naval base. Ask for him when you get to the vehicle checkpoint.”
“What about my—”
“Parry looks after his civvies, sir. You’ll get accommodation in the barracks.”
“Okay. Yeah. Sure.”
Hoffman drove off. It was interesting how people who weren’t used to following orders usually did what they were told if they were scared enough. He caught Hayman staring at him.
“What did I do wrong now?” he asked. “I didn’t shoot him.”
“No, you’d leave that to Trescu.”
Anvil Gate became the here and now again. “I’ve shot civilians. Just like you’ve switched off life support machines, I’ll bet. Everybody justifies their actions.”
He wasn’t sure if that had shut her up or if she’d just gone back to ignoring him. He found himself fuming and not sure who he was angry with, but it was probably Prescott.
Bioweapons. You bastard. Just tell me. We fucking fried Sera together, and you think I can’t be trusted to know about this?
He had to find Baird and let him know. Or maybe he’d just go and punch it out of Prescott this time, or just punch him for the hell of it.
The pall of smoke that was drifting toward the town had definitely focused everyone’s attention. Hoffman got as far as the town hall and had to park the Packhorse. Townspeople were standing in the road outside and spilling onto the green, clustered around the war memorial, and he could see Anya and Rossi in the middle of the crowd. He rated the tension level at pissed off and scared but not dangerous. Even so, he made a show of escorting Hayman into the center of the mob to keep everyone calm. These were the kind of folks who wouldn’t start a ruck if a frail old lady was there.
??
?You cowardly asshole,” she hissed. “You’re using me as a human shield.”
“Diplomacy, Doc. Shut up and look sweet.” Hoffman steered her into the crowd and the focus started shifting to her. “Mind your backs, people—medic coming through. Anyone suffering ill effects from that goddamn smoke?”
Anya gave him a raised eyebrow that spoke volumes. “Sir, we’ll be ready to start moving vulnerable individuals in a couple of hours along with the sector closest to the CZ. I’m just explaining to the neighborhood delegates how we’re going to prioritize moving supplies and personal possessions.”
“Two hours isn’t enough,” one of the men said.
“Then we’ll come back for the baggage later,” Hoffman said, “as per Lieutenant Stroud’s contingency plan.” Was that in there? He wasn’t sure, but Anya knew what she was doing, and he wasn’t about to second-guess her in front of civvies. “Lives first. Food next. Pianos last. That’s the way we do things. Go home and start packing according to that priority list.”
Hayman spoke up. “And if anyone thinks they’ve got health issues, get yourselves into the town hall and I’ll take a look at you now.”
Hoffman had no idea why she did that—to save face, or help break up the crowd, or because it really needed doing. He didn’t care. The crowd began to disperse. Rossi did his gentleman act and escorted her toward the town hall.
“They’re just cascading the information, sir,” Anya said. “It’s the easiest way to communicate with a couple of thousand people.”
“We don’t have accommodation ready at the other end yet. If any want to hang around, Sharle’s going to be grateful for the breathing space.”
“Have we got the time?”
“I’m still thinking in terms of a couple of weeks to complete this. Where’s Delta?”
“With Lewis, talking to the fishermen.”